


"Underneath this Garb, We're Perfectly Ordinary Americans"

by stillscape



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:32:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1332016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would take some kind of superhero to keep teen mayor Benji Wyatt from getting impeached. Fortunately, superheroes are real. </p><p>An AU starting pre-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Partridge, Minnesota, 1994

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to c00kie28 for the prompt and diaphenia for the beta.

**Partridge, Minnesota, 1994**

Ben Wyatt slumped forward on the desk, for what felt like the millionth time that night, and closed his eyes to stop the spinning in his head. It didn’t help. Numbers still raced past his eyeballs: big numbers, small numbers, numbers with fiddly decimal points. Some of them were calculus problems, though he wasn’t even in school at the moment. But most of the numbers--most of them meant money, or a total lack thereof.

He shut his eyes tighter and wished for the spreadsheets to just...go away. He’d been a fool to think he could run the town in the first place, and a bigger fool to think he could do it well. The notion that he might have been able to fix months of mismanagement with one overnight budget session, well, that only seemed moderately foolish. The mayor’s desk was enormous and wooden, and he felt very small at the moment, stretched and thin and transparent, like anyone passing by could have read all of his thoughts.

No one was passing by. He knew that. He was alone until the dawn broke, and when it did, he wouldn’t be mayor anymore.

Maybe, if he tried very hard, he could just fall asleep. He’d wake up with a crick in his neck, but he wasn’t going to fix anything anyway.

Then he remembered the look on his mother’s face when she’d seen the headlines calling for impeachment, and he groaned.

Behind him, he heard a loud thump. He jerked upright, sending his roller chair back a few inches, which was the wrong direction, since it rolled his chair right into something blurry and yellowish.

“Hello!”

“Good lord,” he gasped. “What the hell?”

“I’m here to help,” said the thing. It had the soft, friendly voice of a young woman, and maybe a young woman’s body, too. But that was hard to tell. It was wearing yellow polka-dot pajamas and had what looked like two giant yellow segmented fly eyeballs over its face. They might have been made out of felt.

Ben rubbed his eyes hard, waited for his vision to return to normal, and realized the fly eyeballs were a mask. He could make out a human nose and two blue eyes.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “And how’d you get in my office? I locked the door from the inside.”

“I’m Waffle Woman,” she said, a little proudly. “And I came in through the window. It wasn’t locked.”

“What?”

“Benji Wyatt,” she said, settling into the chair across from his desk, “do you believe in superheroes?”

Ben shook his head--not because he didn’t believe in superheroes, but because he didn’t believe this woman was in his office. He did believe in superheroes, of course he did; they had been all over the news lately, and, in fact, for his entire life. How often had he wanted to be one himself? He wasn’t, though. He hadn’t been born with any particular powers, and he hadn’t acquired any. Partridge didn’t have much in the way of mad scientists or nuclear power plants.

So then, he wondered, what was one _doing_ here? Superheroes were predictable. There were patterns to their behavior. They wore better costumes than this, and they were all tall and muscular, even the women, and they stuck to big cities, or national landmarks. New York. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Mount Rushmore. Not small towns in Minnesota.

Then again, this person was probably not a real superhero. She had, after all, climbed in through his window.

“I’ve never heard of--what was the name?”

“Waffle Woman,” she said.

“Right.”

Waffle Woman--good lord, that was a ridiculous superhero name--crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Well,” she said, “I’m new.”

“Okay. What are you doing here?”

She unfolded her arms and stood up. She was quite small, Ben noticed. Then she snapped her fingers, and several large binders appeared out of nowhere. These she stacked neatly and piled on his desk.

“I told you, I’m here to help.”

Ben looked around, glancing out the window. The building wasn’t collapsing. There weren’t any fires or swarms of robots. And if Partridge had a supervillain then it was probably him.

“Look...Waffle Woman,” he said, feeling more ridiculous than usual as her name left his mouth. “This isn’t really a superhero situation.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “You have to figure out a way to make your failed winter sports complex a success, and you have to do it tonight, because you’re going to be impeached in the morning.”

Ben nodded mutely, avoiding eye contact with Waffle Woman. He stared at her binders instead. _Turn Ice Clown’s Frown Upside Down_ said the one on top.

“I’m not _frowning_.”

“Yes, you are,” she said, pulling the chair she’d been sitting in before closer. She settled in it, leaned over, and flipped the top binder open.

“Sorry, but what exactly is your superpower?” Ben asked. He wanted coffee, which he’d only started drinking six weeks ago and which he still thought tasted pretty gross. “Time travel? Are you going to take me back in time and stop me from trying to build this thing in the first place?” It was the only thing he could think of that might help.

“No, weirdo,” she said. “The Paradox Kid has that one locked up. Had.” She swallowed, and Ben knew she was thinking about the same thing he was, the recent gruesome discovery of _two_ Paradox Kids in a New York City elevator shaft, each having apparently killed the other. No Paradox Kids had been heard from since. “ _My_ superpower is efficient municipal government.”

Ben snorted. He couldn’t help it. “That,” he said flatly, “is not a superpower.”

“Is too. I also have the power to help you stay awake for as long as necessary to get the job done.” She grinned and tossed a shiny new calculator across the desk. “C’mon, Mr. Mayor. Let’s get cracking. All night work! All night work!”

The calculator, when Ben grudgingly picked it up, was warm to the touch, and lighter than the old graphing calculator he’d been punching hopelessly for the past several weeks. He ran his fingers over the buttons, wondering whether this felt like a mocking goodbye present or whether it might somehow represent a fresh start.

Either way, it didn’t make the piles of numbers any less intimidating.

“So let’s get to it,” said Waffle Woman. She rolled up the sleeves of her polka-dot pajamas to the elbows and plunged into his pile of spreadsheets.

Ben watched her for a moment, then took a deep breath and rolled up his own sleeves.

After several hours, they were no closer to solving any of his problems, and Ben was ready to admit defeat.

“There’s no way,” he said.

Waffle Woman gritted her teeth. “Don’t give up. We can fix this. I know we can fix this.”

“We can’t fix this. Not in the--” Ben checked his watch--“approximately twenty minutes we have before the city council gets here to impeach me.”

“They’re going to impeach you at seven in the morning?”

He nodded. “They’ve really been looking forward to it.”

Waffle Woman slumped back in her seat, apparently defeated. She had a smudge of blue ink at the end of her nose, Ben noticed. His thumb twitched in that direction, as though it was going to try and wipe the ink smudge off.

“Crap on a jackrabbit,” she sighed. “My city council would never show up anywhere that early.”

Ben leaned forward. “Where are you from?”

She sat up. “Nowhere. I mean, it’s the best town in America, probably the world, but I can’t tell you where it is.”

“Why not?”

“Secret identity, Ben. Every superhero has one.”

“Right.”

“Underneath this mask, I’m just an ordinary, devoted citizen with aspirations towards a career in public service. You know. After college.”

“Right.”

“And with the mask on,” she continued, suddenly rather glum, “I’m a failure.”

Ben coughed. “What?”

“I failed.” She waved a hand over their labor. It had gotten them _somewhere_ , but not nearly far enough. “My first real superhero job, and I blew it.”

And even though he was the one about to get impeached and have his life ruined, Ben suddenly felt worse for her than he did for himself. But _he_ wasn’t a superhero. He was a failed 18-year-old mayor, and on top of that, he was (he hated to admit) entirely helpless around girls. Especially pretty ones. Though he had no idea whether Waffle Woman was pretty. She hadn’t taken off the waffle mask.

He suspected she was pretty.

She sniffled.

“Um.” Ben stood up. “Hey. You--look, you didn’t fail. This was way too big of a hole for anyone to dig their way out of. You did way more than anyone else even tried to.”

“I know,” she said, her voice small.

Ben swallowed. “So, you know.”

Waffle Woman nodded, then took a deep breath. “I know. If at first I don’t succeed, try, try again.”

“Of course. And maybe try to find a person to help who isn’t a total lost cause.”

“You’re not a total lost cause.” Waffle Woman stood up herself, and to Ben’s surprise, she crossed to his side of the desk. “I need you to know that.”

“Okay.” His voice was ridiculously uncertain.

“And I need a hug.” She initiated it before he could respond, and Ben tensed. “Relax,” she murmured, and somewhat uncertainly--did he even know how to relax anymore?--he released into her arms, and let his own wrap around her.

After a moment, he let one hand slide into her hair. It was as yellow as everything else she wore, and tied back in a practical ponytail. He slipped the end of it between two fingers and noted that, appropriately, she smelled a little bit like maple syrup. Her scent was a detail he fully intended to remember.

“Can I see your face?” he muttered.

Waffle Woman shook her head. “No. Secret identity, remember?”

“Who are you, though?” She was going to leave soon, she had to leave soon, and he suddenly needed to know everything he could before she did. “How did you get your superpowers? Were you born with them? Where are you going? What--are you absolutely sure I can’t see your face?”

She shook her head again, resolute. “You can’t know any of that. But…”

That felt hopeful. “But?”

“But you can kiss me,” she said. “I mean, if you want to.”

Ben’s hand slid from the end of her ponytail to the base of her neck. His fingers slipped under the elastic band of her waffle mask. But he didn’t try to dislodge the mask. Somehow, he thought, as her tongue pushed into his, kissing her told him nearly everything he needed to know.

Around them, Partridge’s City Hall rumbled to life, with opened doors and squeaking floorboards.

“Uh-oh,” said Waffle Woman. “I’d better--” She swallowed and looked up, meeting his gaze. “Take care, Benji Wyatt. Don’t give up. And I won’t either.”

“I won’t,” Ben croaked, though he had no idea what he meant by it.

She flashed him a final smile before she climbed out the office window and landed in the bushes with a thump and an “Ow!”

“You okay?” he called.

“Fine! I’m fine. Remember, I was never here!”

The room seemed to spin around him, and he sat down again, head in hands, wondering why he hadn’t tried to peek under the mask at least a little bit.

The office door creaked open. _The_ office door, he reminded himself. Not _his_. Not after today.

It was his mother. “Good morning,” she said, hesitantly. “I brought you a donut.”

He looked up. “Thanks.”

“And the Council wants to see you in about ten minutes.” She looked around. “Benji, what on earth were you doing all night?”

He stood up, shook his head, and made to sweep past her without collecting his donut. Instead he was stopped in his tracks by the horrible, inescapable Kleenex smeared with a dab of his mother’s saliva.

“ _Mom._ ” He might be about to be impeached, but he was still the _mayor_ for god’s sake, and he was _eighteen_.

“Hold still, Benji,” she ordered, scrubbing away. “There’s blue ink on the end of your nose.”

As he made his way to the City Council chambers, head held as high as he could manage, he tried, and mostly failed, to put his mysterious superhero out of his mind. Upon reflection, perhaps the most impossible thing about Waffle Woman was that she had been totally devoid of waffles.

***

_to be continued..._


	2. Northfield, Minnesota, 1996

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now with bonus college AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta thanks to the ever-glittery diaphenia.

**Present day (Northfield, Minnesota, 1996)**

Ben Wyatt was just preparing to clear his throat over the last few bars of “Hell” when he noticed a messy brown ponytail through the glass partition. All the insights about the Squirrel Nut Zippers he’d been preparing to share left him, and he bumbled through his sign-off instead. Maybe--he hoped--the owner of the ponytail hadn’t been listening too closely, although given that she was waiting to take over the booth from him...well. 

Laurie bumped her way into the booth after he’d thrown on his last song (it was Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, which he’d meant to introduce more thoroughly and contextualize with regards to _Swingers_ ), pushing the door open with the curviest part of her hip. She had her usual plastic milk crate of CDs under one arm and her hat and scarf in the other hand. 

“Nice one,” she said. 

Ben jumped up and held the door open as best he could, angling himself into the tiny space between the chair and the back wall, knowing full well she’d have no choice but to brush him with her extended elbow on the way past if she wanted to avoid taking him out with her backpack. 

She always chose the elbow. 

“Oh, sorry. Thanks.” 

“No problem.” It wasn’t much, the swipe of her puffy down parka against his plaid flannel, he had to admit that. “So, uh.” He coughed once, swore at himself, and tried leaning against the door for that casual look he was sure he’d be able to master one of these days. 

Laurie failed to notice; she was too busy grabbing a bright red CD from the top of her milk crate to wave at him. “Look at this. New Belle & Sebastian. The record store just got it in, the bastards. It came out a week ago.”

“Oh yeah?” He vaguely remembered her saying something about it. 

“Yeah. It’s supposed to be awesome,” she said. “I’ve been going out of my mind. What’s the delivery guy, the super speed flying one?” 

“The Ischemicinator?” 

“That’s a hell of a name.”

“He delivers organs for transplantation. See, the Cold Ischemic Time--”

Laurie shook her head. “No, I wasn’t thinking of him. The one that does normal packages.” 

“Oh, you mean the UPS guy.” 

“There’s a special…?” She caught the look on Ben’s face and rolled her eyes. “Right. Anyway. This album. You should stick around.” 

“Right. Yeah, of course.” 

“But also, shoo. I need to get going.” She sat, reaching for the headphones, and Ben hastily leaned over to grab his own milk crate of CDs and backpack and puffy down parka. And, as he’d done pretty much every week this semester, he plopped himself on the hideous ancient couch in the outer half of the basement. By some standards, he knew (they were his mother’s standards, and really also his, if he was being honest), there were better times and places to do his econ homework than three A.M. in the campus radio station. 

 

**Eighteen months previously...**

Things had gotten better in the months since he’d left Partridge, slowly but surely. They weren’t perfect, but they were better. His grades were good. He had almost single-handedly secured the last college Model U.N. victory, which he considered an accomplishment. The Ultimate championship was another accomplishment, even if his little brother was still making fun of him for joining an Ultimate team. He had his his superhero club, and he was probably going to get a radio show for sophomore year, and those were accomplishments too. 

Right now none of his accomplishments seemed to matter very much. He was, in fact, ready to give up. 

The door opened, and then his roommate said something, but Ben aggressively continued not listening, a job made easier by the large headphones covering his ears. He didn’t care if there was a party going on in their room, or the next room, or any room. He was going to sit right here, on his own goddamn bed, with his own goddamn VCR and his copy of _Return of the Jedi_. He’d watched the movie so many times that the picture was starting to streak in the middle, but he didn’t care. He needed this. 

His roommate unplugged the television. 

“I was _watching_ that.,” he huffed. 

“Dude, take the headphones off for a minute, at least.” 

“No. Plug the TV back in.” 

Ryan turned to the handful of people crammed in the hallway. “Sorry about him, guys. Come on in.” 

To Ben’s horror, they started to do just that. “Wait, wait.” He ripped his headphones off. “Are you having a party in our _room_?” 

Ryan said nothing, but clearly the answer was yes, because six or seven people clustered into the room, most of them carrying grocery bags, and deposited themselves wherever space was available. The last person to squeeze in was a girl, and the last open space in the room was the other half of his bed. 

The last thing Ben wanted right now was a girl in his bed, but that, apparently, was what he was going to get. He recognized her, vaguely, in the sense that he’d probably seen her around the dining hall or something. She had long brown hair and wore a flannel shirt, clean but far from new, over an R.E.M t-shirt. That was something, maybe. If he had to share his personal space with a girl right now, at least it was with a girl who was dressed like a female version of him. He’d wear that R.E.M. t-shirt, in fact, except that it was loose on her and she was bigger around than he was. 

“Hey,” she said, settling herself cross-legged on his comforter. She was tall-ish, judging by how much space her legs took up. “Want me to take my shoes off?” 

“Yes. Please.” 

He studiously ignored her as she bent over to unlace her Doc Martens, and only acknowledged her again when she leaned back against the wall and nudged his arm. Instead, he focused his vision on a tiny mole on his wrist, and tried to pretend Ryan wasn’t loudly explaining that Ben had been in a terrible mood since his girlfriend had dumped him three days ago. 

“Here you go,” said the girl, handing him a PBR. 

“Thanks.” The beer was warmish and a little flat, but it was beer, and Ben decided that for once he wasn’t going to care what would happen if they got caught drinking (underage, no less) in the dorms. 

“Ben, you know everyone,” said Ryan, nodding around. 

“No, I--” But Ryan had already moved on, and didn’t hear. 

The girl sitting in his bed said, simply, “Laurie.” 

“Hey.” 

“Hey.” 

 

**Present day**

“You’re listening to KRLX,” said Laurie’s voice, over the speakers, “and guess what, guys? I’m so stoked about playing some cuts from this new album for you guys, I haven’t even taken my coat off yet.” Ben looked up from his econ homework, almost involuntarily, and caught her eye. 

She winked at him. 

Two hours later, he had completed his econ homework, which--in retrospect--perhaps he shouldn’t have. He had the rest of the week off for Thanksgiving, after all, and _homework_ was a legitimate reason to lock himself in his bedroom, away from the World War III that erupted every time his parents insisted on spending a holiday as a family. 

Laurie emerged, bundled. “You still here?” 

“Yeah.” Like he wasn’t always still there. “Coffee?” 

She nodded. “Sure.” 

They were dates, but they weren’t _dates_. He and Laurie weren’t _dating_. They were just friends, friends who listened to each other’s radio shows. They knew things about each other. It was a small campus; everyone knew at least one thing about everybody else, even if they hadn’t been subject to statewide public humiliation at the end of high school, like Ben had. 

So yeah, she knew about his past. But she didn’t care very much. No one here cared much anymore, but she had never cared in the first place.

He knew that she was from Duluth, that she had one younger brother who’d joined the military straight out of high school and was in basic training somewhere now, and that she was friendly enough with most people but confided in few. She’d stopped eating red meat in middle school. She liked doing her radio show but (as he’d learned during a disastrous presentation in the poli-sci class they’d shared the previous semester) speaking publicly in front of people who could _see_ her made her wildly self-conscious. She had no idea what she wanted to do after graduation. Some asshole (she never told Ben his name) had once broken up with her in a smoky club, during a set that was so loud she couldn’t hear anything he was saying, and she’d followed the guy outside only to be dumped a second time. 

It was a terrible story, but she told it so well he almost couldn’t help but laugh. She made him laugh a lot. 

 

**Twelve months previously...**

Ben glanced up from his stack of newspapers, massaging his aching right hand with his print-smudged left, just in time to see a few people he knew walk past the window of their study room. The first waved and the second nodded. The third person, however, said something to her companions (who left without her), opened the study room door, and stuck her head in. 

“Hey.”

Ben coughed. Was she talking to him, specifically, or--well, no one else had really bothered to look up. Their unwavering focus was one of the reasons he thought of them as _his people_ , even more than he thought of his Ultimate team that way. 

“Hey, Laurie. What’s, uh--what’s--how’s it going?” For some reason, he felt the need to place a newspaper over the cover of his bright yellow clipping binder. The green and blue ones seemed more...normal, so he left them. 

“Okay, so, sorry to interrupt, I just--what are you _doing_ in here every week? Nice t-shirt, by the way.” 

“Oh.” 

One hand self-consciously smoothing his Letters to Cleo shirt over his chest, Ben glanced around the study room. Piles of newspapers from major cities were stacked on the conference table, along with binders full of Xeroxes and clippings. Those things paled in comparison to the somewhat insane wall chart which maybe (he occasionally thought) made it look as they were tracking serial killers instead of investigating connections between the more minor of the good guys. 

“Well,” he said, “this is superhero club.” 

“Superhero club.” 

“It’s not an _official_ club. More of an interest group. We collect information.” He cleared his throat. “I mean-- _real_ superheroes. Not like Batman or Spider-Man.” 

“Lame,” muttered one of Ben’s people, from the back of the room. Ben shot an annoyed glance over his shoulder. (Batman _wasn’t_ lame, even if he was fictional, but Ben was kind of tired of having the argument.)

Laurie looked faintly amused. Ben thought. He couldn’t tell. She had one of those faces that was kind of hard to read.

“Uh-huh.” 

“Yeah. See, you only hear about the big, flashy superheroes. We pay attention to the smaller ones, the ones you _don’t_ hear about often.” 

“So what do you do with all this information?”

 _That_ question sent a rush of adrenaline through Ben’s veins, and he sat up a little straighter. 

“Okay. Have you ever used, like, an email listserv or seen those websites people are putting up? We’ve just been collecting stuff on paper, and putting it in these binders, but it’s starting to seem like the internet is going to be the way to go. We’re hoping to establish a student-driven database, one that might be searchable--you could just type in a name or something, and…” He trailed off. 

Ben had realized, some time ago, that there were two reactions to superhero club. Either you were still into this stuff and were thrilled to discover other people were too, or you’d lost interest somewhere in middle school and only cared about the major events, like averted plane crashes or that time last year when Ultrajerk (who was barely even a superhero, _come on_ , just because he had powers didn’t automatically make him a _hero_ ) punched a Great White Shark in the face. Superheroes were like sports that way, some people said; you either cared deeply or hardly at all, although some other people (like him, for instance) bristled at the comparison between superheroes and sports. 

Laurie nodded. “Cool.” She gave the room a final once-over. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you around. Have a good Thanksgiving.” 

“See you,” he echoed. 

The door clicked shut behind her, and Ben returned to the library’s stack of last week’s _Indianapolis Star_. Someone had folded the Thursday paper incorrectly, and it was messing up his thought processes.

 

**Present day**

And here it was the week of Thanksgiving break, and all he’d managed to do was this same thing, every week: hang out pathetically in the lounge while she did her radio show, under the pretense that she shouldn’t have to walk back to the dorms alone at five in the morning. But they never went back to the dorms right away. They went to a coffee shop just off campus, where they paid for each other on alternate weeks and sat on opposite sides of the table talking about everything and nothing. 

He was pretty sure that at this point, the barista was making fun of them every time they left. 

They kept coming back, though. Laurie liked the coffee shop because it had a good vibe and the best cheese Danish within walking distance, and Ben liked it because the owner was an _X-Files_ fan, and also because Laurie liked it, and--last but not least--it had recently started carrying a wide variety of regional newspapers, including Chicago and Indianapolis. He was spending a little more on newspapers than he had been on Xeroxing the library’s copies, but...newspapers weren’t expensive. It was worth it. 

He wished one of the newspapers would explain how to tell your best friend that you wanted to make out with her (and more, if she would have it), but none of them did. 

He’d considered going to a magazine stand or a bookstore--surely there was something--but he hadn’t ever bothered to make the trip. Buying a guide to romance just seemed weird. 

Besides, he was smart. He could figure this out.

 

**Six months previously…**

Pushing the apartment door open, he felt ominously empty, for a reason he couldn’t quite place. 

“Ben Wyatt! You made it!” 

“Hey, Laurie.” He looked around the apartment as he shrugged off his jacket. There wasn’t room to move much more than his head, and there wasn’t anywhere to put his jacket, except on top of all the other jackets. The place--it belonged to Carlos, the station manager--was packed. That was the problem with nearly everybody living on campus; it made off-campus parties into nightmares. 

Laurie pushed through the crowds to grab his arm, and the empty feeling dissipated a little bit. 

“Ben, c’mere.”

A sickly sweet smell emanated from her--rum, he thought, mixed with a touch of clove cigarettes. Vaguely, he registered that she was dressed up...sort of. Her shirt was a little tighter and a little lower-cut than he was used to seeing, and she was wearing a skirt, her legs the standard shade of Minnesota winter pale above her usual Doc Martens. 

He was about to tell her she looked nice, even though he was pretty sure that might be weird, when she hiccuped. 

“So,” he said, “you’re drunk already.” 

She nodded. “You’re not.” 

“No.”

“We need to fix that. Semester’s over!” 

That was the emptiness, maybe--that the semester was over, and tomorrow after breakfast, he’d throw a couple suitcases in the trunk of his dad’s car and be hauled back up to Partridge for the summer. And what was in Partridge? Not much. A minimum-wage job, if he was lucky. Friends from high school who weren’t exactly friends anymore. He regretted, for the millionth time, his lack of success at nailing down an internship somewhere in the Twin Cities. You had to have a car to get to the interviews, that was the problem…and he didn’t have a car. 

In Partridge, he wouldn’t have much in the way of friends, either. But he had those tonight, so he let Laurie pull him into the tiny kitchen, where Carlos shouted “Ben!” and immediately roped him into several rounds of tequila shots. 

Some time later (he was having a hard time reading his watch; the room was currently unstable), one of the DJs put on the local Top 40 station. Ben cringed, and the entire apartment audibly groaned in unison. 

“The fuck,” yelled Laurie, from across the living room. “Turn that shit off.” 

“No way,” Carlos yelled back, laughing. “Macarena forever.”

“I’m gonna get you fired from the station!” 

“Fuck you. I’m graduating.” 

Ben took a pull of the beer that was in his hand, the beer he had no recollection of acquiring, and nodded his head in time with the music. It was catchy, you had to admit that. And with his brain as fuzzy as it was, the Macarena didn’t sound as terrible as it usually did. A few people were trying to do the arm dance thing; it wasn’t going well, and he decided not to join them. 

He started marking the passage of time in songs, and in beers, and in the conversation he was having with a girl he’d seen around the station but didn’t know very well. They had talked, once, at a station pizza party; he couldn’t remember what about. Music, probably. She was petite and blonde and almost reminded him of someone, though he couldn’t figure out who. Her name was Jane. She seemed like a Jane. He didn’t know what that meant. 

Mariah Carey came on, then Boyz II Men, then some car commercials, then more music. 

Jane was kind of cute. Halfway through “The World I Know,” Ben realized she was acting as though she thought _he_ was kind of cute. 

She looked like his ex-girlfriend, the one who’d dumped him freshman year. That was who she looked like. His ex-girlfriend had been cute. 

“It’s really hot in here,” he mumbled. “I’m gonna get some water.” 

He pushed his way to the kitchen, swapped his empty bottle for a red Solo cup of lukewarm tap water, and decided air would be a good idea, too. 

“Going outside?” Jane asked. She’d followed him. 

He nodded. She followed him outside, too, where they sat close together on the building’s back stoop and she offered him a cigarette that he refused. 

“It’s really loud in there,” she said. He nodded again. 

The nice thing about Jane was, even though he was drunk, she wasn’t hard to talk to. She was also drunk, of course, which probably helped. 

“What?” Jane said suddenly. 

“What?” 

“You were looking at me really funny.” 

“Sorry.” Ben shook his head, trying to clear it. Now he felt dizzier. “I’m...not sober?” 

She giggled. 

“Sorry,” he repeated. “I just kind of--you look like my ex.” 

“Is that a bad thing?” 

Ben shook his head. In all honesty, it wasn’t.

Jane stood up, dusting off her rear. “Wanna get out of here?”

“Oh.” He blinked. It didn’t put his brain back into focus any better than shaking his head did. “Yeah. Okay. I just--let me get my jacket.” 

Upstairs, he grabbed his jacket and looked around, meaning to say goodbye. But he couldn’t see Carlos, and he couldn’t see Laurie either, and he didn’t want to take too long, so… 

It was a fifteen-minute walk back to campus. By the time they got back to Jane’s room, and she pulled him inside and slammed the door behind them, he was sober enough to think he was sober enough to make good decisions. 

Jane was really _cute_ \--she really was--and he hadn’t been with anyone in what seemed like forever, and she was here now, and she wanted him. She wasn’t just cute, no; she was _magnetic_ , that was what she was. She was magnetic and he was attracted to her like--like a magnet. 

He slid his hands around the back of her neck and let instinct take over. 

The next morning, he woke up in his own bed, half-dressed, because someone had set off a phone inside his head. After six or seven rings, he remembered there was a real phone in the room, and maybe the ringing was coming from there. 

He rolled over and almost knocked the phone onto the floor. 

“Hello?”

The person who’d made his phone ring turned out to be Laurie. “Breakfast?” 

He groaned. 

“Drink some water,” she ordered. “I’m gonna shower. Twenty minutes?” 

“Okay.” 

It took her forty-five minutes to show up at the dining hall, by which time Ben had determined that his hair needed sunglasses because the sun was hurting his scalp. 

“Remind me not to drink tequila,” she said, without preamble. “Like, seriously. Call me at random moments during the summer and remind me that tequila is the devil.” 

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I just feel like hell. So remind me.” 

“Will do.” 

She stole half a piece of toast from his plate and contemplated both buttered and unbuttered sides. “What happened to you last night? I went to look for you and you were gone.”

He swallowed. “I kind of left with Jane?” 

“Oh.” 

“Yeah.” 

Laurie took a bite of the toast. She took a second bite without chewing. Then she chewed, slowly, and swallowed, slowly, and stared at the toast some more until Ben couldn’t stand the tension anymore and pushed back from the table. 

“I’m gonna get some more coffee. Want any?” 

“Okay.” 

He returned with two mugs of coffee to find her gone; she returned a moment later with a giant bowl of Cheerios, sat down, and stared out the window. 

Ben studied her, as closely as he could without her noticing. She must be hungover, he decided, because she always noticed when anyone tried to look at her closely. But she didn’t appear terribly hungover. She looked like she always looked, except that her hair was still damp. 

“Look, it was just--”

Laurie turned to him. 

“Last night,” he started, and realized he couldn’t think of a way to continue. 

“You and Jane?” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not--I mean, you know, we’re friends and all, but it’s not like it’s my business--I mean--.” 

“We just--okay, yeah.” 

“I don’t need the details of your sexual exploits.”

The ensuing silence was, paradoxically, rather deafening. 

“She’s cute,” Laurie offered, half a cup of coffee later. “I don’t really know her, but she seems nice.” 

“Yeah.” 

“You gonna call her?” 

This had not, in all honesty, occurred to him, and he was pretty sure--based on how they’d left it last night--that it had not occurred to Jane, either. She had, after all, made it very explicit that her expectations had not been satisfactorily met, and then she’d hidden her entire body (including her head) under the covers and told him to get out. Which he had. Then he’d had the additional pleasure of passing by a girl he now knew to be Jane’s roommate grumpily changing channels on the common room TV. 

“No,” he said, before his brain insisted on replaying _that_ conversation. 

At this, Laurie perked up. “Ben Wyatt. You cad.” 

“It wasn’t like that.” 

“What does that mean?”

“It...didn’t go well.” Ben sighed and ran one hand across his scalp, hoping he’d be able to massage his brain if he pressed hard enough. “I very much regret telling you anything.” 

She gave him half a smile, which he returned, tentatively. 

After a few moments of silence, Laurie plucked an invisible ball of lint from her shirt and said, “Carlos tried to hit on me last night.” 

For some reason, Ben felt hot again. Hangover, probably. The moment he took to respond had already started to feel uncomfortably long before he managed to blurt out an “Oh yeah?” 

“Yeah. It was weird.” 

Ben coughed.“So…did you?” 

“Did I what?” 

“You know.” 

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t make me say it,” he groaned. 

Laurie snorted. “Of course not. _Carlos_?” She snorted again. “I do have standards.” 

Outside, the sun moved behind a cloud, sending a soft shadow across Laurie’s face and hands. She was gazing out the window again, the sun streaking her still-damp hair, her soft round fingers wrapped around her coffee cup. 

His brain started to scramble up the different parts of last night, presenting a scenario in which he’d left the party with Laurie instead of Jane. What would that have been like? Less humiliating, certainly. Not that he would have slept with Laurie, but if he _had_ slept with her, it...things would have...Jane had wanted it quick, but Laurie liked to take her time, in general. Would that apply to sex? It would. Laurie would want to take it slowly, let them both sober up a little more, give them both a chance to relax. And she was _kind_ ; Laurie was sarcastic but she was kind, and if something wasn’t right she would make that thing known. 

But she would be a little shy about the whole operation, too, he imagined. She didn’t particularly enjoy being looked at, but would she enjoy being _touched_? Yes, he imagined, she would--but it would be a gradual process. She wouldn’t jump in with both feet. She’d dip in a toe, then go up to her ankles, then her calves, and if all went well--he remembered last night’s skirt--if all went well, he’d press his hand flat against the outside of her thigh, running it up to the curve of her hip. He had never seen so much as an inch of calf or thigh before last night, but he knew what her hips looked like; she couldn’t hide those no matter what she wore. And why should she? Her hips were great. 

Ben’s blood rushed around, and suddenly he was very grateful that he was wearing his loosest jeans. He felt his face flush hot, and--she wasn’t looking at him, thank god, because he--

Oh, _fuck_. 

He felt nauseated all over again. 

She hadn’t fooled around with Carlos because she had standards. _And what are those standards?_ he suddenly wanted to ask. But Carlos was also a skinny, messy-haired nerd, and (much more importantly), he’d just told Laurie that he’d slept with someone else last night. How had he not realized Jane had been the wrong someone? What was wrong with him? Did Laurie now think he _didn’t_ have standards? 

“So yeah. I’ll call you to remind you about the tequila,” he said. 

Laurie kept looking out the window. “You know I was kidding.” 

He swallowed. “I know.” 

He thought about her all the way back to Partridge, and for the next few days after that, and when his mom decided they should go up to the lake house for the weekend, he thought about how much more fun the whole enterprise would be with her there, even if he couldn’t quite imagine what kind of bathing suit she would wear. A plain black tank suit, probably--she wouldn’t want to show anything off--oh, god, even a plain black tank suit sounded exciting. 

When they got back to Partridge, he dialed her home number with jumpy fingers--he had a fake reason; he had to keep up the joke about the tequila--and remembered too late that she would be visiting her brother at his Army base. 

He hung up without leaving a message. 

Confessions worked better in person anyway, and he had an entire summer to plan one out. 

 

**Present day**

“What’d you think of the new Belle & Sebastian?” she asked, taking one deft step around a frozen puddle. 

Ben made what he hoped was a noncommittal sort of noise. “I think I’d have to listen to it a bunch more times to really get it, you know?”

“I could make you a tape.” 

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat again. “That’d be great.” 

 

**Two months previously…**

“I go to the bathroom for two minutes and this happens?” 

Ben looked up. “Sorry.” He cleared the newspapers from half of the table, and Laurie sat down across from him, arching her eyebrows. She wrapped her fingers back around her cup of coffee and peered at the open pages in front of him. 

“Anything good today?” 

He had the scissors out, but no. “Not so far.” 

“She’s been awfully quiet.” 

“She usually is at this time of year. I think she’s back in school.” 

Laurie shook her head. “Trust you to be obsessed with the world’s strangest superhero.” 

“She isn’t--”

“Ben,” Laurie laughed, “she calls herself Waffle Woman and she _doesn’t have anything to do with waffles_. That’s like the first thing you told me about her.” 

“Okay. So that part I still don’t have figured out. But she’s really cool otherwise.” 

Laurie picked up his Waffle Woman clipping binder and started flipping through it. This wasn’t the first time she’d done so, but it still gave Ben butterflies when she did. He felt nothing extraordinary when anyone from superhero club looked through his work. It was different when Laurie took an interest. Every time she opened the binder, he felt strangely naked. 

“Three-quarters of these articles don’t even mention a superhero, let alone Waffle Woman,” she said. 

“That’s always been her M.O. She had a couple of failures early on, and since then, I don’t think she’s wanted a lot of credit.” 

“I get the appeal of being really into something obscure,” Laurie said, shutting the binder. “But how do you even know this stuff is her?”

Ben pulled the binder closer to himself and turned it over. “Because there are clues, all sorts of--do you really want to know?”

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “I do.” 

He pulled his master chart from the back pocket of the binder. It was, he hated to admit, much more thoroughly researched than any of his seminar papers. 

“Okay,” he said, smoothing the spreadsheets across the table. “Here’s what I know. Or what I think, anyway. Waffle Woman wasn’t born with powers, or if she was, she didn’t start using them until the summer of 1994. Well--” He cleared his throat. “At least, the first time she was spotted as Waffle Woman was when she saved the annual Fourth of July parade in Snerling, Indiana. See, the town was broke, but she organized all the local Girl Scout troops, got them working with the local senior citizens’ center, and they did this past, present, and future of the Fourth kind of thing.” 

“I’ve never heard of Snerling, Indiana.” 

“No one has.” 

“So how did you find out about her in the first place?” 

Ben swallowed. “There was a news segment. She was on it.” 

It was the partial truth. For months after his late-night office encounter with Waffle Woman, he’d read the paper cover to cover, every single day, looking for news of her without ever finding it. She had to be from the region, he was sure of it. True, her accent hadn’t been Minnesotan, but then his wasn’t either, so what did that really tell him? Midwestern, though--she seemed Midwestern in demeanor. But there was no news of her in the _Minneapolis Star-Ledger_ , ever. 

He had been about to give up when--moping around at his mom’s house over Christmas break during his freshman year--he’d flipped on CNN to find one of those cheerful heartwarming fluff pieces about superheroes convening at various children’s hospitals. One of the hospitals was in Indianapolis, and there, in the background of one brief shot, was a small blonde figure in yellow coveralls and a yellow felt waffle mask. This very last part, that he’d seen her on a news story about a children’s hospital, was the only part he felt was particularly relevant to his conversation with Laurie, and therefore the only part he mentioned out loud. 

“So I figured she must be from Indiana,” he continued, “and I started reading the Indianapolis papers. It’s kind of hard to get the small-town Indiana papers up here, but there’s a network of enthusiasts, you know, so sometimes I can trade clippings. Like, there’s this woman in South Bend who’s tracking the Man of 10,000 Lakes, so we’ll swap…” 

“Okay.” Laurie looked slightly less skeptical, or maybe not. “And her superpower is...not waffles.” 

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. It’s efficient municipal government.” 

“Oh dear god.” Now he was sure of Laurie’s expression; it was clearly _trying not to laugh_. “That’s not a superpower.” 

“It’s...different,” he allowed. “I mean, honestly, I think she mostly just shows up in the night and gets stuff done when no one’s looking. Or helps people get stuff done that they couldn’t do alone.” 

Laurie took a deep breath. She had not, to her credit (he thought) actually laughed. “But the name. Does she just really _like_ waffles?” 

“As near as I can tell. Anyway…” He sighed. “I know she’s young, like around our age. I think she goes to IU, because the things that could be her work, they slow down during the school year and most of them happen within a fifty-mile radius of Bloomington. In the summer they’re all over the Midwest, but still mostly in Indiana. Other than that, I have no idea.” 

“Have you thought about driving down there and walking around the campus wearing a sandwich board that says ‘I Love You, Waffle Woman’?”

“Good lord.” He had. Well, not those exact words, and not a sandwich board, but yes. “Of course not.” 

Laurie snorted into her coffee. 

“I’m embarrassed to be seen in public with you now,” she told him, but the next week, she bumped her way into the radio station with a copy of the previous day’s Indianapolis paper on top of her milk crate, and he sent a silent thank-you to whatever higher power had miraculously kept _that_ from getting screwed up. 

Later that morning, when he’d finally gone to bed, the words _don’t give up_ played on repeat in his head in a voice that wasn’t his. He thought the voice might have belonged to Waffle Woman. 

 

**Present day**

“Looking forward to going home?” 

Ben grimaced. “Not in the slightest.” 

“Me either.” 

“Why not?” 

“Eh. It’s nothing major. Just, my cousins are coming.” 

He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. 

“Oh. That...sucks?” 

She snorted. “It’s fine. They’re both just, like...one runs track, so she’s obsessed with that, and the other’s a sorority girl. We don’t have anything to talk about.” 

A few snowflakes drifted down from the sky. Great. That would make driving home more fun, if it kept up. His dad would be in a _great_ mood after driving down and back in the snow. 

“That sounds like me and Henry.”

“Your brother?”

“Yeah. He got weirdly popular after I left. He’s a basketball star now.”

“Is he much taller than you are?”

“Surprisingly, no.” 

“My cousins always look judgmental.” 

“About what?” 

She shrugged, he thought, though it was hard to tell through the parka. “You know. Everything about Thanksgiving. Pie. Me eating it.” 

“Oh. Well, screw them.” 

“I mean, I don’t _care_ , obviously.” 

“You shouldn’t.” 

She stopped walking, and he automatically stopped too.

“Ben.” 

“What?” 

She was looking at the treetops, or the sky, or something, milk crate of CDs held in both hands now, a barrier between them. 

“Are we--do you--” Laurie shook her head, exhaling a shaky breath that instantly fogged, clouding her face, and walked on. “You know what, never mind.” 

Ben’s pulse sped up, independent of him. It thundered through his ears and made everything warm (except his nose; his nose was still cold) and _god_ he was stupid, he should have said something the minute he’d seen her after they came back from summer break--

“No,” he blurted. “Wait.” 

“What?”

“ _Yes_.”

“‘Yes’?” Her eyebrows were raised now--very pointedly, in fact. 

He took a deep breath. “Yes, I like you. As more than friends. If that’s what you were asking.” Please, he thought, please let that what she had been asking… 

She nodded. 

“So I can…”

She nodded again. 

Ben dropped his milk crate on the ground and let instinct take over, and thankfully, Laurie moved her crate back to her hip before he closed the distance between them. Kissing her felt...different than all the other girls he’d kissed. The angles were different. He didn’t have to duck, only tuck his chin a tiny bit; Laurie was almost as tall as he was. He put his hands around her shoulders, one on either side of her backpack, but between his gloves and her parka, he couldn’t feel much of anything. Her lips were slightly chapped from the wind. His were probably chapped too. It didn’t matter; none of that mattered. 

Laurie took half a step back, breaking them apart, and blinked. 

“Okay?” he asked. 

She bit her lip. For a moment, he worried, but then she exhaled, nodded, and laced the fingers of her free hand into one of his. 

“Coffee?” 

He dropped her hand for just long enough to pick his CD collection up from the ground. The crate was wet on the bottom, now, and dirty water dripped down his pants leg. He didn’t care. 

“Coffee,” he agreed. 

At the shop, he got the Indianapolis and Chicago papers, along with two black coffees and two cheese Danish, which he took back to their usual table, where Laurie was guarding the milk crates. This morning, for the first time, he sat beside her instead of across the table. 

She leaned into him, just a little bit, as they poked at the Danishes. Sans parka, she felt solid and soft at the same time. It was...nice. 

He never opened the newspapers, just stuffed them into his bag as they prepared to leave. 

“When are you leaving?” 

Ben glanced at his watch. It was just past six in the morning. “Around seven tonight. Whenever someone gets here.” 

“Yeah, me too.” 

Outside, back in coats and gloves, carrying backpacks and crates, he found it infuriatingly difficult to hold her hand for the walk back to campus. How had they made it to the coffee shop in the first place? The sun was starting to rise, reminding him that he’d been awake for twenty-plus hours straight. Bed sounded really appealing right now… 

“Hey, so, um…” Ben swallowed. “You know I have a single this year, right?” 

 

**One month previously…**

Ben didn’t usually leave his dorm room door propped open, but tonight it was worth it, just to see people walk down the hall in whatever ridiculous getups they had come up with. He was tying his boots when Laurie’s voice said “What the hell are you supposed to be?” from the hallway. 

He looked up. “Batman, obviously.” 

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I couldn’t see the hat thing when you were bent over.” She invited herself in and crossed to his bed, but didn’t sit down. Instead she started inspecting the photos and press clippings along his wall. 

“Cowl,” he corrected automatically. “What are _you_ supposed to be?” She was dressed normally. 

“Someone who’s too old for Halloween costumes.” 

“But it’s a costume party.” 

“I have Groucho Marx glasses,” she said, patting the rear pocket of her jeans. “You sleep with a picture of Waffle Woman next to your bed?” 

_That_ didn’t make him look good. 

“It’s not intentionally next to the bed. The wall was full. That’s just kind of where it wound up.” 

It was one of the few photos of Waffle Woman he’d ever found, and it was a great one, even if it was blurry in the way black-and-white newspaper photos sometimes got. She was in the classic superhero pose, head high, chest open, hands on hips...but she was standing on top of a playground structure, in a newly built park in one of Indianapolis’s most impoverished neighborhoods. 

“Hmm,” said Laurie. She put on the Groucho Marx glasses. “Okay. Let’s go.” 

Ben resolved to rearrange his pictures over the weekend. 

 

**Present day…**

He woke for the second time when Laurie shifted under his arm, rolling herself towards the wall, but he didn’t open his eyes right away. It was nice just to lie here, in this bed that was way too small for two people, with their bodies pressed together and her warmth permeating his chest. 

He’d been right, as it turned out. Laurie did like taking it slow, and she was a little bit shy, and this--the feeling of his arm draped around her waist, of his fingers curled up against her stomach--this was good. So what if they had come back to his room, explored each other briefly over their clothes, and fallen asleep? They had hours, still. And after a nap…well, he’d been right about her hips being great, too, and how good his hand looked against her bare thigh. _She_ had imagined, she said then--she said it without blushing--that he was the kind of guy who would care whether or not she came, and though he unfortunately hadn’t managed to make her come _first_ , she liked what happened after the condom had been discarded and he’d started touching her again. 

“Ben,” she whispered now. “Are you awake?” 

“Yeah.” 

When he opened his eyes, he found her tracing the edge of a press clipping with her finger and realized he’d never rearranged his pictures after all. 

“This is going to sound so stupid, I know,” she said, rolling back over so she could snuggle under his arm, “but it’s actually kind of cute that you like her so much. She’s a good role model.” 

Ben watched Laurie’s index finger trace abstract designs on his chest...wait, were they abstract? No. She circumscribed a circle, then went back and forth in parallel lines, and when she started a second set of lines that was perpendicular to the first, he knew. 

“I met her once,” he said softly, realizing, as the words left, that he had never confessed this to a living soul before. “Waffle Woman. A long time ago.” 

Laurie shifted, propping herself up on her elbow, and gave him a critical squint. “Really? When?”

“The night before I got impeached. She...I was alone in City Hall, trying to--I don’t even know what I was trying to do, and right before I gave up, she climbed in through the window with a bunch of office supplies.”

“She climbed in through the window,” Laurie said. He could not, in the slightest, blame her for the note of disbelief in her voice. 

“I know.” He took a breath and let it out, slowly, watching Laurie’s hand rise and fall against him. “She didn’t really help, in the end, like it didn’t make a difference at all, but--but she was the only person who even _tried_. And she didn’t even know me, you know?” 

“And then what happened?” 

“She just left. She climbed back through the window and fell into the bushes, and I never saw her again. I never even saw her _face_. She kept her mask on the whole time.” 

“Okay.” 

“I guess I felt like--she told me not to give up. That was the last thing she said. ‘Don’t give up.’”

Laurie remained still for a moment, then spoke quietly. “You know, you never talk about that.”

“The impeachment?”

“Yeah. Like, I remember hearing about it on the news, but...” 

Ben twitched involuntarily. He still did, every time. 

“It was awful,” he said. “And it was worse because it was all so obviously my fault. I was the one who ruined everything. And she--” He took another deep breath. “I can’t imagine how much worse I would have felt, if someone hadn’t told me not to give up.” 

For an entire two minutes--he counted the seconds, one hundred and twenty of them--Laurie didn’t speak. Then he felt her take a deep breath. 

“I can’t believe you never told me until now,” she said. “I mean, I can, but you should have.” 

“No one wants to hear about it. Or they just want the gory parts.” 

“That’s not true.” Her hand started tracing patterns on his chest again. This time they really were abstract. “Anyway, it makes your stalker tendencies seem a lot less crazy.” 

He swallowed. “Thanks, I guess?” 

Laurie pushed herself up, supporting herself with one hand on each side of his body, and kissed him. He kissed her back, and reached up for her breast. She moaned when he took her nipple in between two fingers, and soon enough, any lingering thoughts of Waffle Woman left his mind completely.


	3. Terre Haute, Indiana, 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terre Haute, Indiana, 2000. 
> 
> Thanks to stars_inthe_sky and throwingpens for the beta.

**Terre Haute, Indiana, 2000**

Ben Wyatt worked diligently, doing his best to ignore the slight wobble ofin his hotel room table. His stomach growled slightly—it was well after dinner time, and he hadn’t eaten yet——but he ignored that too. He wasn’t going to die of starvation in one night. He might, however, die of an anonymous death threat. Or rather...well, he wouldn’t die of the threat, per se. But someone had left him a death threat that afternoon, in the form of a misspelled slogan keyed into the driver’s side door of his reliable old Honda, and a death threat certainly seemed to indicate that he might die. Soon. 

He was having a pretty hard time ignoring _that_ , which was exactly why he needed to work through dinner, as well as whatever _X-Files_ or _Star Trek_ rerun might be on TV tonight. The sooner he got his final recommendations written up and submitted (which he could do by email, thank god), the sooner he could get the hell out of Terre Haute. Any midnight snacks would be working snacks, too. Ben fully intended to work through the entire night, if that was what it took. 

A sharp crick in his neck interrupted his train of thought, and he reluctantly stood up to stretch. Rubbing a few fingers over the cramp, he stepped to the window and squinted through a tiny gap in the curtains. 

There was his car, which he’d parked under a lamp as directed. All of its windows were still intact, as far as he could tell. Shifting his eyes to the left a little revealed the two very bored cops who’d been assigned to keep an eye on things. They weren’t the same cops who’d interrogated him this afternoon, and for that, at least, he was grateful...although they’d probably heard about the interrogation. 

_“So you have no known enemies in this town.”_

_“No.”_

_“No prior arrests, convictions, run-ins with police—”_

_“No! I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. Or a parking ticket.”_

_“And you have no idea who would threaten to—what exactly was the threat?”_

_“To slash my throat like I slashed the payroll. ‘Payroll’ was spelled with an E instead of an A.”_

_“Is that relevant?”_

_“Maybe!”_

_“Mr. Wyatt, I’m going to have to ask you to calm down now.”_

_“I’m completely calm. Why would you think I wasn’t calm?”_

_“You have broken off the tip of that pen stabbing the tabletop, not to mention that there is now a divot in the wood. Both of those are examples of damage to government property, and I’m going to have to make a note of it.”_

_“Oh, no, that—”_

_“And you are extremely sweaty for a man sitting in a room air-conditioned to 65 degrees.”_

_“Is it still only 65? See, that’s part of the problem with you people—with this town—the air conditioning! It’s February! Why is the air conditioning even on? Just open a window, or—because now you’re also having the heat come on automatically. Has no one in this town heard of thermostats?”_

_“Mr. Wyatt.”_

_“Okay. I’m throwing the pen away now, see? There! I threw it!”_

_“Mr. Wyatt, I understand you’re upset, but I’m going to have to ask you not to throw pens, or anything else, at a uniformed officer.”_

Someone—a teenager, maybe, he couldn’t tell from here on the third floor—walked right past the cop car and up to his Honda. Without even bothering to glance back to see if the cops were watching, the person wiggled a small, elongted styrofoam container out of the front pocket of his hoodie, and proceeded to pummel the Honda’s windshield with a dozen eggs.

“Hey!” Ben yelled. “Hey! Cut it out!” He banged on the window, but it was useless. No one could hear him, and even if they could, he was pretty sure no one cared. 

All at once, the entire weight of the Terre Haute budget came crashing down onto his shoulders. He staggered back from the window and flung himself across the bed with all the drama of a frustrated adolescent. 

What if this wasn’t the right path after all? He’d developed a pretty good aptitude for making the numbers work, he knew that much, but maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe there was another job that involved making numbers work, one that didn’t result in eggs and death threats. He could work for the IRS—no, that probably wasn’t it. Corporate finance. That probably had fewer death threats, but a much lower chance of earning any public trust. And that had been the whole point of becoming a state budget auditor, hadn’t it? A path that sounded easy enough in theory, but turned out to be much harder in practice? 

The travel was okay, or at least it hadn’t bothered him yet. He had friends in Indy, but no one he was so close to that the friendship suffered when he was on the road for weeks on end. It was nice, actually, just having an obligatory catch-up over dinner or a beer every couple of months. He wasn’t dating, hadn’t been out more than a couple of times since his grad school fling had petered out, hadn’t been seriously attached since college. That seemed okay right now, though, even though Valentine’s Day was on Monday. Sure, it would have been nice to have someone to give a thoughtful gift to, or to take out for a nice dinner, but those things weren’t priorities. Career first, love later. 

It was all part of the plan. 

He closed his eyes and took a few deep, regular breaths, each exhale marking one point on his personal checklist. 

In. Out. _Investigate revenue and expenditures thoroughly before taking a single action, no matter how small._ It was tough—how the hell were you not supposed to instantly conclude that the city could save money by not cranking the AC so high? But he was getting better at it. He was. 

In. Out. _Make the hard decisions_. He was doing that. No one appreciated it now, but they would later. They would have to. 

In. Out. _Age does not equal wisdom_. It was all too easy to be cowed by older mayors or city council members or, really, any employee who’d clearly been entrenched in their work since before Ben had graduated middle school. But that shouldn’t matter. He had knowledge, and training, and a valuable skill set. He had also calculated that if he’d had a dollar for any time he walked into a government building and someone made a crack along the lines of “Do you even need to shave yet?”, he would have been able to build that ice-skating rink after all. Or buy a pair of skates, at least. 

His neck twinged again, and he groaned. Twenty-five was too damn young to feel this old. 

In. Out. _Don’t give up._

In. Out. 

There was a loud, rapid tapping at the door. 

“Huh?” 

Ben sat up and squinted. Everything felt fuzzy, including his brain and the roof of his mouth. His watch dial was on the underside of his wrist now, and he twisted it back around, noting with dismay that it was now almost midnight. Had he really just slept for three hours? 

The tapping continued. 

“Coming,” he called. 

He stopped at the window first and took a quick glance outside. The cop car hadn’t moved, although the cops inside it appeared to have fallen asleep too. His Honda now sported a second batch of eggs, splattered artistically across the hood. Whether they were dried to his car or frozen to it, he wasn’t sure. But they were definitely stuck. 

The tapping became more persistent. Impatient, almost. 

“I’m coming!” 

He looked through the peephole and almost fainted. 

“Open up already,” yelled Waffle Woman. 

Ben’s heart beat like a jackhammer as he fumbled with the deadbolt, his hands suddenly clammy. He pulled the door open, and she walked in, shooting him a smile as she crossed the threshold. 

“Took you long enough.” 

“Sorry.” The word echoed in his ears, foreign and distant, and he surreptitiously pinched his arm to make sure he was awake. It hurt, so he supposed this wasn’t a dream; with that decided, a weird tingling warmth enveloped him. “I passed out, I guess.” 

“With all this work to do?” 

“I didn’t intend to fall asleep.” 

She grinned. “I know.” 

A magical garlicky scent filled his nostrils, and it was only then that Ben realized she was carrying a pizza box and a six-pack of soda. 

“First things first,” she said, putting the pizza and soda on the wobbly table. “You haven’t eaten. I hope the pizza didn’t get cold. It’s freezing out there. Oh, crap on a comic book.” Turning to him, she laced her yellow-gloved fingers together, cracking her knuckles, and asked, “You do remember me, don’t you?” 

_Good lord_ , Ben thought. How he could have—how _anyone_ could have—but the words didn’t materialize, and he merely nodded. 

She continued talking about the pizza—crust and toppings and god only knew what else—but Ben couldn’t process any of it. He sagged into one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs and started cataloging all the details of her appearance. 

Whether or not she had changed much in the past six years, he couldn’t really tell; the Waffle Woman in his memory usually shimmered around the edges. But he remembered that she’d been wearing pajamas the last time, and it was easy to see she had upgraded her costume considerably. Her mask was new, different even from the last round of pictures he’d seen in the newspaper. While still yellow and waffle-patterned, this one was sleeker, shinier, more of a classic cat’s-eye shape. Instead of the pajamas, she now wore a knee-length yellow wool overcoat and yellow snowboots. These she stripped off to reveal a thick, cozy-looking yellow sweater (waffle-knit, of course), yellow striped socks, and blue jeans. 

“Your pants aren’t yellow.” 

It was, possibly, the dumbest sentence he had ever allowed to come out of his mouth.

“I know.” Waffle Woman sighed deeply, then sat cross-legged in the other chair, tucking her feet underneath her. “It kind of ruins the effect. But this is my casual look. Tights are too revealing. And do you know how hard it is to find yellow jeans?” 

He shook his head. 

“I mean, it’s not totally impossible, but it’s hard, especially because I’m short.”

“Right.”

“I tried buying white jeans once, and dyeing them.”

“And?” 

“They didn’t come out very well.” She popped open the top of the pizza box. “Anyway. Sit. Eat.” 

He sat, but didn’t eat. 

“I think I’m too stressed out to be hungry.” 

Under her mask, Waffle Woman’s brow furrowed. “That’s not good,” she said, plopping a pile of grease and cheese on a paper plate for him. “I think, if you eat, you’ll feel less stressed out.” 

When this failed to motivate him, she pressed her elbows into the wobbly table and leaned into them. Her eyes, clear and blue, locked onto his. 

“Normally I’d say something like _When a superhero brings you pizza, you eat it_.” 

He remained silent. Somewhere deep in his brain, things felt off. 

“But in this case…” She leaned a little closer. “Ben, it really is just a pizza.” 

“Well, I didn’t think it was, like...radioactive or anything.” 

“Not like _that_. It’s—I’m not here to try and rescue you this time.”

Ben waited for the _but_ , and was surprised when it didn’t come. 

“I’m not going to finish your budgets. You can do that on your own. And you should. You don’t need my help.” 

“If I don’t need your help, then why are you here?” 

“What you need right now is moral support. And I’m really great at that.” 

This—all of everything that was happening right now—ran contrary to almost everything Ben had ever learned about superheroes. Sure, some of them concentrated on smaller stuff, but never had he heard of superheroes showing up late at night with pizza. Not unless it was to a homeless shelter or a pediatric cancer ward or something like that. Superheroes didn’t deliver pizzas to lone bureaucrats. 

“Oh, and I’m going to help you get out of here in the morning. You’re getting death threats. That’s not cool.” 

“You’re offering protection?” He remembered her all but falling out the office window all those years ago, and tried to imagine what exactly she’d be able to do in the event anyone made a concerted effort to kill him. 

“I’m a superhero,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. Ben chastised himself. 

“Right. I know. I just—” 

“I mean, no, I’m not bulletproof, and I don’t have super strength or anything, but I know a lot about self-defense.” 

“So you are here to rescue me.” 

“No. I’m here to _help_.” She pulled a second slice of pizza out of the box, plopped it onto a plate for herself, and then scraped all the extra cheese off the bottom of the box and ate that first. 

Finally, Ben took a bite of his own slice. It was no calzone, but there was undeniably something particularly restorative about the combination of crust, mozzarella, tomato sauce, and pepperoni at hand. Did superheroes have magic food additives? Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d sprinkled something on the pizza. Waffle dust or whatever it was that gave her her powers. Or maybe it was just a really good pizza. 

“It’s the company,” she said. 

“Are you a mind-reader?” 

“No,” she laughed. “Your expression makes it really obvious what you’re thinking, though.” 

His cheeks flushed hot. “Oh.” 

Waffle Woman let out a cackle, and raised her can of soda as if to toast. “It helps, not being alone.”

That was it, he realized. It was. From the minute she’d walked through the door, he hadn’t felt alone. He swallowed, and realized his near-permanent tension headache was starting to recede. It was completely gone by the end of his second slice of pizza. Waffle Woman, having finished her own, gave the table a very matter-of-fact straightening. 

“I’ll take that,” she said, holding out her hand for his plate. He handed it over. She pushed all his paperwork back front and center. All this happened before he could even stand up to offer assistance. He stood up anyway. 

“Thanks.” 

“My pleasure,” she said. “Now. To business. You get back to work.” 

“Right.” 

“And I’ve got to make a phone call. Do you mind if I do it in here? I won’t be too loud, I just don’t want anyone to overhear me in the hall—oh, I know, I’ll go in your bathroom. If that’s okay.” 

Ben watched her pull a top-of-the-line Nokia from her purse. “Sure.” 

“One last thing first,” she said, and then she flew around the table and enveloped him in a warm, solid hug. 

More than anything else in the world right now, Ben wished he could slip off her mask. He wouldn’t try; he wouldn’t even ask, but god, did he wish he could see the rest of her face. Other than that, he had absolutely no idea how to react, and he tentatively slipped his arms around her shoulders. 

“I should have done this earlier on, the last time. And you have to do it now.” 

“Huh?”

“Hugging. It helps me focus my powers. I can sort of transfer some of them to you. It took a little while before I figured that out.” 

“So I’ll be more efficient?” 

“A little. And you’ll be able to stay up all night a lot more easily.” She coughed—not a real cough, but a throat-clearing one. “Uh, Ben, you do have to reciprocate.” 

“I what?”

“Hug me back. Hard. Hug me like you mean it.” 

He did, and to his astonishment, he soon became suffused with a sort of warm energy. 

“You should feel like you’re glowing,” she said. “You won’t actually be glowing. But most people describe it as a glowing feeling.” 

Ben considered this for a moment. “Like...drinking hot chocolate in front of a fireplace?” 

“Exactly. With extra whipped cream.” Waffle Woman grinned at him, then tucked her head against his chest. “Let me know when you start feeling s’mores.” 

Just as Ben began wondering whether she’d be able to _tell_ when he started feeling s’mores (whatever that meant), or whether he might be able to prolong the embrace indefinitely, her phone rang. 

“I should get that,” she said, finishing the hug with a friendly pat on the back. “You’re good to go.” She disappeared into the bathroom. 

Ben sat down at the table, cracked his knuckles over the pile of spreadsheets, and realized he could almost, _almost_ taste graham crackers. For half a second, his mind flitted to the Waffle Woman binder he’d stopped updating when he’d moved to Indiana. The whole enterprise of superhero club seemed woefully comical. How had he ever imagined that collecting press clippings could help anyone understand the experience of being in a superhero’s presence? 

But in the next half-second, he developed a laser-like focus on the task at hand, and he was soon so engrossed in completing his report that Waffle Woman’s bathroom conversation barely registered. 

Barely. 

Because she was clearly talking to a boyfriend, giggling cheerfully into the phone, and there were no possible circumstances under which he’d fail to notice _that_...even before she ended the conversation with a confident _I love you_. 

He decided to say nothing about it when she finally hung up her phone and plopped herself cross-legged on his bed, a slightly dreamy expression on what he could see of her face. Waffle Woman pulled a well-worn biography of Eleanor Roosevelt from her purse and soon seemed lost within its pages; Ben returned to the task at hand. 

She seemed to sense the moment he’d finished. “I’ll go down to the business center and print those for you,” she said. “Got ‘em on a floppy disc?” 

He did, but he didn’t relinquish the disc quite yet. “This hotel doesn’t have a business center.” 

This earned him a devious grin. “It can. Efficient municipal government, remember?” 

A few minutes later, she was back, and Ben was forced to admit that he’d never seen such a neatly presented report before. She’d put everything in a top-of-the-line binder, the kind with double-reinforced rings. The Thomas Jefferson epigraph on the cover page was a bit of an odd touch, but since it appeared to have been done in neat calligraphy by Waffle Woman herself, he decided not to mention it. 

“Well, that oughta do it,” Waffle Woman said. “Are you all packed and ready to go?” 

“Packed? I—no. What time is it?” 

“About quarter to five. But you’re done. You might as well get out of Dodge. I’ll deliver these for you.” 

“Okay.” He still felt alert, but less so. “Um, take them a floppy, too, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure thing. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” 

She collected her coat, shoved her feet into her boots, and vanished through the door. The moment Waffle Woman left his room, drowsiness began to set in. He started up the coffee pot. Deciding a shower might help, he gathered up a change of clothes and retreated to the bathroom. 

Somehow he wasn’t surprised when he got out of the shower and found Waffle Woman back in his room (though he didn’t recall giving her the key), mugs of hotel-room coffee poured, and an assortment of donuts on the table. Well, he was maybe surprised about the donuts. 

“Not...waffles?” 

She shook her head. “It’s freezing out. They wouldn’t stay warm enough on the way over.” 

“Oh.” He chose a coconut-covered cake donut. Waffle Woman made a disgusted face at his selection and went straight for the chocolate glazed. 

By the time they’d each had two donuts and Ben had packed up his suitcase, the sky had turned a pleasant gray-orange. Waffle Woman wrapped herself back up and announced she’d walk him to his car. 

“That cop is useless,” she said. Ben had forgotten there was even supposed to be a cop. “Oh, by the way, I got all the eggs off your car.” 

“Thank you.” He meant it. He really, really meant it. 

“It’s my pleasure.”

“No, I mean—really. For everything. Not just tonight, but—” He swallowed. “Partridge, too.” 

Waffle Woman blushed, he thought, though it was hard to see under her mask. “Well, I wasn’t much of a help there.” 

Ben reached out, catching her arm, and cursed himself. He had always thought he’d never see her again. And he’d always thought that if he _did_ see her again, he’d immediately confess how much that one night had meant to him. Instead he’d just let her barge in and help, and all he had done all night was work. She deserved to know, to really _know_ , that her first mission hadn’t been a total failure after all. 

“You were. You…” He waited for a moment, letting his pulse regulate itself. “The whole thing just sucked, okay? And I was alone. And then you showed up. And you…”

Waffle Woman said nothing. 

“You told me not to give up. I didn’t really know what you meant, at the time. But it was—it was really important to me that you said it. That you came, and that you said it, and that I wasn’t trying to...” He took a deep breath. “Accomplish everything alone, you know?” 

Still, Waffle Woman said nothing. 

“Sorry,” Ben said, suddenly feeling more flustered than grateful. “Am I not supposed to—is there some sort of protocol?” 

Waffle Woman shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice very small. “That was just…thank you, Ben.” 

And she hugged him again. This time, he reciprocated without prompting. 

“I feel...pancakes?” 

“Whoops.” Waffle Woman took a step back and brushed herself off. “Sorry. I don’t want to get you sticky.” 

“Uh…” said Ben, rifling through a mental catalogue of all the superpowers he’d ever heard of. _Maple syrup transference_ was not listed. He licked his lips, thought he tasted butter, and decided that he couldn’t possibly. 

“I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” said Waffle Woman. “I’ll take the back stairs. You check out. It’ll be much easier if the clerk doesn’t see me.” 

When Ben arrived in the parking lot, he found his car already started and de-iced, though he didn’t remember giving her those keys either. The death threat was still etched in his door. Waffle Woman stood beside the hood, ice scraper dangling limply in her hand as she stared up at the sky. 

Ben followed her gaze, and read _WAFFLE WOMAN, IT’S OVER BETWEEN U_. He didn’t have to wait for the plane to finish the S. Waffle Woman clearly didn’t either. He stood, dumbly, sensible roller-wheeled suitcase frozen behind him. 

“Go,” she said, her voice a little flat. “I’m fine, Ben. Really.” 

“I…” 

She shot him a watery smile. “My work here is done. You get back home. Start your Valentine’s Day plans early.” 

The cold air forced Ben’s eyes closed in a blink. When he opened them again, she was gone. 

As he pulled onto the interstate, Ben ruefully acknowledged that there was absolutely no reason Waffle Woman needed to know his Valentine’s Day plans were to get his car repainted, then order kung pao chicken and watch old VHS tapes of _The X-Files_. He hadn’t had a Valentine’s Day date since he’d broken up with Laurie, and her idea of celebrating the holiday involved pizza and not leaving the house. 

He took one final glance in his rearview mirror. _OVER BETWEEN US_ was just fading away.


	4. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to diaphenia for her beta services, which I own.

**Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2001**

Ann Perkins had never believed she was special. 

This wasn’t a bad thing, or a sad thing, not necessarily. For her entire life she had known, down to the marrow of her bones, that she was special to some people, like her family, and this degree of specialness usually seemed like enough. She was special to her parents and grandparents and so forth because they were linked by blood; she was no more or less special than her siblings, and that was as it should be. 

Sometimes she felt _different_ , sure. That just came with the territory of being one of the only biracial kids in the area. But her parents were normal even if they had different skin colors, and her family was normal as a whole, so by third grade it had really stopped being a big deal. 

But in all other respects, Ann felt ordinary. She was pretty enough, but not drop-dead gorgeous, and certainly not _sexy_ (Sometimes she thought she could have been sexy, if she had tried. But she never bothered trying, and spent a considerable amount of time in high school lamenting the relative flatness of her chest. The year she decided to be Julia Roberts in _Pretty Woman_ for Halloween, she was kind of baffled by how good the dress looked on her.) She was smarter than many, but she wasn’t brilliant. She mostly thought she was a nice person; her mean girl streak was there, she knew, but it didn’t come out more often or more strongly than anyone else’s. 

There was nothing wrong with being ordinary. It was pretty easy to be ordinary. Ordinariness brought with it a pretty nice life, and a sense of contentment. Ann was content to have the boy next door as her senior prom date; she was content to find herself at the Ann Arbor campus with so many others from her high school; she was content to follow her mom and her aunt and her mom’s best friend into nursing. Nurses were the good kind of ordinary too. Nursing was a solid, steady job, and it was a useful one, even though Ann sometimes doubted that she was very good at it. She soldiered on, though. The world would always need nurses. 

That was what Ann Perkins was explaining to her friend and fellow nurse Ann Rutherford, as they spent their mutual break trekking the shared use trail at the Parker Mill County Park. The trail was paved, and was typically more of a stroll—but it had snowed last night, and the paths hadn’t been plowed yet. Fresh January snow blew up, buoyed by little gusts of wind. A few flakes found their way onto the tip of Ann’s nose, which had started to run. She swiped at her face with a damp wool glove and immediately regretted the decision. The glove had been scratchy. 

She considered protesting, or at least suggesting they do their walk somewhere warmer (like inside the hospital), but bit her tongue. Ann Rutherford was probably Ann Perkins’ best friend on the nursing staff, even if their friendship was based mostly on similar shift schedules and a shared propensity for rolling their eyes whenever one of the doctors started cracking jokes about all the Anns in Ann Arbor. But friendship was friendship. Ann Rutherford was determined that this was the year she would lose those twenty pounds, and Ann Perkins had agreed to support her. Frostbite, she decided, would be the dealbreaker. Until she got frostbite, she would continue to shiver her way up and down the shared use trail during their breaks. Today, Ann was working the night shift and wasn’t even on for another few hours, but she’d shown up for their midday walk anyway. 

Ann Rutherford was a decent listener, which helped. 

“I mean, it’s not that I wanted him to propose,” Ann Perkins was saying. “You know? I’m not even sure I want to get married, ever. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to get married right now, not to Brian. But it would be nice if he’d give me some indication of what _he_ wanted. Like, does he think this is going anywhere? Does he just want it to be _this_ forever?” 

“Mmm,” said Ann Rutherford, politely, as they approached the old grist mill. “Oh, hang on. I’ve got to retie my boot.”

The last sentence didn’t register with Ann Perkins.“Because I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe I should talk to him? I mean—” 

She was interrupted by a huge amount of snow, a whole shovelful of cold wet snow, which flew out of nowhere and landed on her head. 

Ann Perkins let out a stream of unprintable words. 

“Sorry!” called a voice. Ann brushed the snow out of her eyes and looked up to the grist mill’s roof, where she saw what looked like a large canary holding a snow shovel. “Oh, my gosh. I am so sorry, ma’am. Here, let me—” 

In a flash, the canary was in front of Ann. It wasn’t a canary at all, of course. It was a short woman dressed in head-to-toe yellow clothing. If these were the new park employee outfits, Ann thought, the county had really done its workers a disservice. The woman’s outerwear clearly wasn’t quite warm enough for this weather. It didn’t look waterproof, either. The ski mask that obscured her face was only going to do so much. 

“It’s okay,” said Ann, fighting to keep two yellow-gloved hands away from her head. Everything suddenly smelled like maple syrup. “I’m not—I’m fine.” She pulled her hat off and shook the snow out, then pulled off a damp glove and quickly ran her hand through her hair. 

Then she froze—not because of the cold, but because the park employee was staring at her. The ski mask obscured every part of her face save her eyes; those eyes were big and blue and round. 

“What?” 

“You’re so _beautiful_ ,” said the woman, sounding awed. 

“Um…” 

“Has anyone ever told you—what am I saying, of course they have. You must hear it all the time.” 

“Okay.” Ann jammed her hat back on her head. It was the only response she could think of. 

“Your boyfriend’s a lucky man. Or your husband. Are you married?” 

“No?” This was starting to get weird. Vaguely remembering something about boot-tying, Ann looked around for the other Ann and saw her hurrying, or at least approaching as fast as the snowy path would allow. It was a rapid shuffle at best. 

“Anyway, back to work,” said the yellow woman. “I’m sorry, again. I didn’t think anyone would be out in the park today.” 

Against her better judgment, Ann asked, “Why were you shoveling snow off the roof?” 

“Because there’s a leak. Or there will be a leak, once all this snow melts. I’m going to fix the roof before it starts leaking.” 

“Ann, what happened?” said the other Ann, finally arriving. “Sorry, I had to take the thing off and readjust my sock.” 

Ann Perkins shook her head, wondering why she smelled melted butter. “Nothing. Just some snow.” She had the strangest feeling that the other Ann hadn’t seen the yellow woman at all. 

She stole a glance over her shoulder as they continued on their frigid shuffle. The yellow woman was shoveling snow off the roof again, even though she couldn’t possibly have gotten back up there already. 

Later, when she told Brian about her encounter over dinner, he snorted. 

“No, but come on.” Ann had been thinking about this more than was strictly necessary. “How the hell would park maintenance even know the roof was going to spring a leak once the snow melted?” 

Brian shrugged. “Inspectors. Like they didn’t fix it before the snow, or something.” 

“Okay, but that doesn’t make sense. There’s no way they would have thought it wasn’t going to snow at all.” It was January. It had snowed a few times already. 

“Maybe,” said Brian, purposefully widening his gaze, “she had a superpower. A leak-detecting superpower.” 

Ann rolled her eyes and swatted him with a throw pillow. 

But…

But was that really such a ridiculous proposition? 

She had about an hour before she had to leave for work. Hoping beyond hope that Brian would do the dishes before he left her place, she connected to her painfully slow dial-up internet and typed “leak-detecting superpower” into the AOL search engine. 

Nothing came up, of course. 

She tried a few other phrases. “Snow shoveling superhero.” Well, there had been one once, but he’d died of a heart attack while sweeping the front steps of his summer lake house and no one had ever replaced him. “Roof-repairing superhero.” Nope. She tried looking up the county Parks department to see if any repairs had been scheduled for the grist mill, but nothing came up. 

“Park maintenance superhero.” That, surprisingly, got a few hits. Ann selected one more or less at random, some sort of fan-run database that catalogued lesser-known superheroes. 

When the page finally loaded, she was greeted with an image of a small blonde woman, dressed entirely in yellow, standing atop a playground structure with her fists on her hips. 

“Waffle Woman,” Ann breathed. 

It seemed so ridiculous, so completely absurd. Ann had never met a superhero. She had never met anyone who had met a superhero. But as she read through the entry on Waffle Woman (compiled by someone with the equally absurd moniker of TallTyrionLannister), she became more and more convinced that Waffle Woman was exactly the person who had thrown snow on her head that afternoon. “Efficient municipal government” was the kind of superpower that would lead someone to fixing a leak in the roof of a government-owned building before it started, right?

“You find anything?” Brian asked, as Ann dropped the customary goodbye kiss on his forehead. 

“Nah.” She wondered why she was keeping it a secret. 

The night shift always sucked. There was no way around that fact. You could make up plenty of reasons why it didn’t suck, or why it shouldn’t suck, but the fact remained that it sucked. Ann wasn’t sure whether it was the fluorescent lighting or the fact that hospitals never got completely quiet that made so many patients’ inner crazy erupt at 4:00 a.m. Whatever the trigger factor, though, erupt it did. Tonight was particularly bad. A particularly nasty flu was going around, and that meant one thing: extra vomit. 

She left St. Joseph’s just as the sun achieved its full, if weak, wintery morning force. More snow had fallen during the night—not much, more of a dusting, but enough to make outside especially pretty. 

Today wasn’t a walking day, and by all rights she should have headed straight home after her twelve-hour shift. Instead, Ann found herself back at the park, crunching slowly towards the old grist mill. 

The park seemed completely abandoned. 

“Hello?” Her voice echoed through the bare trees. “Hello? Waff—” Ann couldn’t bring herself to finish saying the name. “Anyone here?” 

From behind the mill, she heard a sneeze. Cautiously, she poked her head around the side of the building.

“Hey,” she said. 

In the building’s lee sat Waffle Woman, hugging her knees to her chest in a folding chair Ann supposed she’d brought herself (it was yellow). A yellow wool blanket was puddled in the snow at her feet. 

“It’s you,” said Waffle Woman. “Or is it you? I thought my dad was here, a little while ago, but of course that isn’t possible.” 

“It’s me.” Ann stepped a little closer. Waffle Woman’s face, or what she could see of it, was flushed and clammy. “Hey. Um, are you feeling okay?” 

“I threw up five times this morning,” said Waffle Woman, who nevertheless nodded her head _yes_. “Somewhere over there, I think? My allergies are acting up.”

Ann raised her eyebrows. “Allergies.” 

“It’s weird, isn’t it? Nothing’s even blooming.” 

“I think you have the flu.”

Waffle Woman shook her head so vigorously that her chair almost collapsed. “That’s not possible.” 

“Were you out here all night in the cold? By yourself?” 

“I was working.” 

“Right.” Ann pulled off her gloves and stepped a little closer. “I’m going to feel your forehead, okay? To see whether you have a fever.” 

Waffle Woman’s eyes widened. “No.” She sounded frightened. 

“It’s all right. I’m a nurse.” 

“You can’t.” She stood up—fast, too fast—and skidded on the ice. “I have to keep my mask on.” 

“No, you need to—” 

At that point, Waffle Woman threw up. 

“Okay,” said Ann. “I don’t want any more nonsense from you, Waffle Woman. You sit right back down in that chair and let me feel your forehead.” 

To her immense surprise, Waffle Woman sat. 

“Now take off the ski mask,” she ordered. 

“But you’ll see my face.” 

“Yes.” 

“You can’t see my face. I can’t tell you my true identity. I’m a superhero.” 

“You’re a superhero who has the flu. I’m going to take you to the hospital where I work, okay? If you just take off the mask now, no one will know you’re a superhero but me.” 

“You might tell someone.” 

“I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” 

Waffle Woman took a deep, shaky breath. 

“You need to get some fluids,” said Ann. “And some medicine. The hospital’s right over there. I’ll call an ambulance. No one will know anything.” 

Slowly, with a shaky gloved hand, Waffle Woman pulled off the ski mask.

“That’s better,” said Ann, trying to sound soothing. She felt the woman’s forehead. “Yeah, you definitely have a fever. Okay. I’ve got my cell phone here. I’m just going to call the hospital and have them send an ambulance over.” She could, she supposed, just drive Waffle Woman over herself, but aside from the vomiting issue, it seemed unwise to invite a near-total stranger into her car.

“What are you going to tell them?” Waffle Woman’s voice was barely over a whisper. 

Ann’s thumb stopped mid-dial. “Um...I’ll tell them that you’re a friend of mine, and we met to go for a walk in the park, but you started feeling sick and I think you have the flu, so I called an ambulance.” 

A huge, peaceful smile blossomed across Waffle Woman’s face. 

“Perfect. That’s perfect. You’re a smart, beautiful snowshoe hare. Who is also a nurse. Whose name I don’t know.” 

“Ann,” she said. “Ann Perkins.” 

“Ann Perkins,” said Waffle Woman. “The most beautiful nurse in the world. And now you’re my friend.” 

“Uh-huh.” Ann started dialing again but stopped her thumb before it got to _send_. “Um. What’s your real name? I’ll have to tell them something.” 

“Leslie Knope,” said Waffle Woman.

“Hi, Leslie.” 

Leslie Knope, a.k.a. Waffle Woman, beamed blissfully. Then she threw up again. 

This time, Ann finished calling the ambulance. 

“I did get the roof fixed.” 

“Good,” said Ann, soothingly. “That’s good.” 

“Ann.”

“Hmm?” 

“You look tired. Beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but tired.” 

“I just got off a twelve-hour shift,” said Ann, wondering whether this was a superhero thing or what, calling people beautiful all the time. 

“I can help with that!” And before Ann could react, Leslie was hugging her. “Hug me back. Don’t be shy.” 

Right. The website had said that was a thing she did, that it helped her concentrate her superpowers, although TallTyrionLannister hadn’t explicitly stated what would happen. Cautiously, Ann hugged back. She got the distinct impression of…

“Fruit salad?” she said, out loud. 

“With whipped cream?” 

“No. Just fruit salad.” It was the kind with too much honeydew and sad grapes. 

“Crap on a runcible spoon,” said Leslie, breaking the hug. “I really must be sick. Do you feel energized?” 

Ann cleared her throat. She felt drained, but decided not to mention it. “Let’s just sit quietly until the ambulance gets here.”

* * * 

When she showed up for her shift that evening—strangely exhausted and halfway through a coffee that was much too large—Ann Rutherford snagged her before she could even throw her stuff in her locker.

“Your friend’s quite a trip,” she said, raising her eyebrows in the direction of Leslie Knope’s room. 

“Oh yeah?” 

“How do you know her again?” 

“Um. College?” That seemed like a good enough answer. She hurried off before the other Ann could ask any more questions. 

“She’s been asking for you,” called the other Ann. 

There was no time to see Leslie before her shift started, but she took the knowledge that a superhero wanted to see her and carried it around all night, a glowing little ember to keep her insides warm. 

Thirty-six hours after she’d been admitted, Leslie Knope was released from Saint Joseph’s. Despite the fact that Leslie was a particularly exhausting patient—keeping her quiet and in her own room was a full-time job on its own—her presence gave Ann a weird sense of security. (Ann had snuck a peek at Leslie’s chart. As sick as Leslie had been, they’d more or less had to sedate her to keep her in bed the first night.) Paperwork seemed to get done faster, medicine arrived from the pharmacy more quickly, and Ann noticed that all of Leslie’s attending physicians suddenly had incredibly legible handwriting. 

Leslie had refused to be pushed out of the hospital in a wheelchair unless Ann did the pushing. Now they stood facing each other just outside the hospital’s side entrance, empty wheelchair between them.

“Well,” said Ann. She wondered, suddenly, how Leslie planned to get home. Indiana was a long way away, and as far as she knew, Leslie hadn’t had a car or anything up here, just a small suitcase that contained roof-fixing tools and a change of clothes so she didn’t have to face the everyday world in her Waffle Woman costume.

“I just want you to know something.” Leslie seemed unconcerned with her lack of transportation or, for that matter, anything other than Ann—who suddenly felt unusually warm. “You are an amazing, brilliant nurse, and—” 

A half-laugh escaped Ann. “You were never assigned as my patient.” 

“I know, but that doesn’t matter. You’re an amazing, brilliant, luminous fish eagle of a nurse, and an even better friend—no,” she said, holding up a hand (Ann had barely even opened her mouth). “I know we barely know each other. But you came and found me. You _saved_ me. So—so thank you.” 

“You’re welcome.” 

“And now I have to hug you for real,” Leslie said hurriedly, sweeping around the empty wheelchair before Ann could protest. 

Ann hugged back, and found she _felt_ like a luminous fish eagle. 

“Bye, Ann!” chirped Leslie Knope, a.k.a. Waffle Woman. “I’ll never forget you.” 

“Bye, Leslie.” 

The wind gusted, sending a lone snowflake into Ann’s eye. She blinked it away. When she opened her eyes again, Leslie was gone. 

“Huh,” said Ann, to no one except herself. She checked her watch. It was close to dinnertime. And, while she rarely ate breakfast for dinner, she thought she might try to convince the cafeteria staff to make her some French toast.

* * * 

Two weeks later, more or less, Ann broke up with Brian, on the grounds that she had tried to envision spending the rest of her life with him and couldn’t imagine anything other than what they had now. When she told him she thought they should be over, Brian was confused. He wasn’t sad, or upset, or angry at her. He was just confused.

“And that confirmed it was the right decision,” she told the other Ann, who couldn’t understand why Ann wouldn’t hang in there for another year and see if anything changed.

Two weeks or so after she broke up with Brian, she was watching a bird from her kitchen window while she stirred her morning coffee. It occurred to her that tomorrow was Valentine’s Day and, barring completely unforeseen circumstances, she would be single for it. The thought didn’t bother her much, but it did bother her a little. It bothered her enough that she decided to make herself pancakes for breakfast. Why shouldn’t she? Today was her day off, and she had no one to please except herself (Brian didn’t like pancakes). 

She was just pouring the first bit of batter when her doorbell rang.

“Huh,” she said out loud, to no one in particular, and went to answer the door. She wasn’t expecting a package, but maybe her mom had sent her flowers or something. Or maybe it was someone offering gutter-cleaning services...missionaries, it might be missionaries… 

Nope. On the other side of her door stood something else entirely. 

“Leslie?” 

“Hi!” chirped Leslie Knope, who pushed her way inside and grabbed Ann around the middle before Ann could even get the door open all the way. “Happy Galentine’s Day! Ooh, something smells really good. Are pancakes being made?” 

The hug was brief, so brief Ann didn’t get any powers. It had also been muffled, possibly, by the immense amount of gift bags in Leslie’s hands. 

“Yes.” Ann trailed Leslie into the kitchen. “I should flip that, actually.” 

“I won’t get in your way. Can I sit down?” She did, without waiting for confirmation, and began arranging the gift bags. 

“What are you doing here? Is there another roof leaking or something?” 

Leslie cackled. “Oh, Ann, you silly goose. Of course not. I’m not in uniform.” 

“Right,” said Ann. That made sense. Maybe. “Do you want some coffee? I just made a pot.” At Leslie’s nod, she poured a cup. 

“Is there whipped cream?” 

“Is there…” Ann started. Leslie was already rooting around in the fridge. She watched as Leslie added an immense amount of sugar, then some Hershey’s syrup, and finally a tower of whipped cream. 

“Mmm,” she said, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “You make really good coffee, Ann.” 

Ann, who had nothing to say to this, lifted the first couple of pancakes from the pan and plated them for Leslie. 

“Do you want to do presents before or after we eat? I usually do presents first, but I guess pancakes get cold fast.” 

“You go ahead and start.” She added more batter to the pan and watched Leslie as her pancakes cooked. Leslie emptied the rest of the whipped cream onto her plate, dotting the edge of her stack in a sort of bouffant. She added maraschino cherry eyes, a butter pat nose, and a Hershey’s syrup smile. Then she stabbed the pancake face with the sort of gusto usually displayed by starving children presented with cake at birthday parties. 

Two stacks of pancakes and three mugs of coffee later (in the spirit of celebration, they’d swapped the whipped cream for Bailey’s by that point), Ann found herself unwrapping a beautifully made wooden birdhouse. It was a scale model of the grist mill in Parker Mill County Park. 

“Aww, Leslie. This is so nice.” 

Leslie beamed. “I made it myself.” 

“You did?” 

“Of course. You can’t buy birdhouse replicas of historic mills. Trust me, I’ve tried.” 

“Right,” said Ann. She turned the birdhouse over to find their initials and the date they’d met inscribed on the bottom, and quickly turned it over again, before she could think too much about the implications of that. 

“I’m heterosexual,” Leslie announced, much too loudly. 

Ann put the birdhouse on the table. “Mm-hmm.” 

“Anyway, happy Galentine’s Day.” 

“So what is Galentine’s Day?” She never had gotten a clear answer on that. 

“It’s something I started a while ago,” said Leslie. “In college, actually. Every February 13th, my best lady friends and I get together for brunch, without any guys, and celebrate each other. And my mom. My mom usually comes too.” 

That, Ann had to admit, sounded like a pretty good idea. “Wait, so shouldn’t you be—wait. Is your mom a superhero too?” 

“I can’t talk about that.” 

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I just—there are certain things I can’t discuss with non-superheroes. Trade rules, you know? You’re the only civilian who even knows about me.” 

“Got it,” said Ann. “Wait, you’ve never told _anyone_?” 

Leslie shook her head. “Nope.” 

“Not even boyfriends?” 

“I’ve only dated other superheroes.” 

“Oh. So do they get to know your real identity?” She couldn’t help but imagine how ridiculous a dinner date would be with a buff masked dude in brightly colored Spandex. Or sex. You couldn’t possibly have sex with a masked superhero, Ann decided.

“Sometimes.” 

“Only sometimes?” 

“Well, once we really get to know each other…” Leslie trailed off, staring into space, which Ann took as a sign that her coffee needed more alcohol. 

“And you never date…”

“Civilians? No. It’s against the rules.” 

“Superheroes have rules.” 

“Of course we do. We’re unionized.” 

“ _Unionized_?”

And so Leslie explained, or at least, she explained as much as she felt she could explain to a civilian. She was registered with the Midwest America Superhero and Tertiary Entity Registration Public Licensure and Activities Network, or MASTERPLAN. 

“There’s a small yearly fee—well, it’s small for me. Dues go to cover collateral damage, so it’s really a sliding scale based on how potentially destructive your superpowers are.”

“Tertiary Entity?” 

“It’s kind of an awkward phrase, I know. But there are three tiers, see. Active superheroes, people with powers who are inactive by choice or necessity, and then the third tier is animals. So they’re considered tertiary entities.” 

Ann gaped. “Are you telling me there are animals with superpowers?” 

“A few. Dogs, mostly. They go undercover in K9 units or as seeing eye dogs.” 

“Seeing eye dogs are _superheroes_?” 

“Not all of them. Just some.” 

Around lunchtime, Ann ordered a pepperoni pizza (“Absolutely no vegetables,” admonished Leslie) and opened a bottle of wine. Leslie explained that while the only absolute no-no was using your powers for a purpose contrary to the public good, there were a lot of minor superhero infractions for which one could be censured. Dating a non-superhero was among these infractions. 

“A lot of people do it,” she admitted. “We pretty much just look the other way. But sometimes it can be a problem, you know, if you break up with someone and they decide to get revenge on you or whatever. So it’s a good rule. And I try not to break the rules, you know?” She gulped. “I’m breaking a rule now, telling you about the rules.” 

“It’s okay. I’m not going to tell anyone.” 

“I know.” 

Two glasses of wine in, Leslie got morose and told Ann a long depressing story about the time she’d been dumped via skywriting while she was wrapping up a mission. 

“That sucks,” Ann stated. It was true. It was a true statement and she made it. 

“It did suck. It sucked a lot.” She paused, contemplating. “It was almost exactly a year ago, actually.” 

Ann held up the wine. “This isn’t empty yet. Should I make it more empty? Into your glass?” 

Leslie giggled. 

After her third glass of wine, Leslie fell asleep on the couch. Ann let her nap while she picked little greasy bits of cheese off the inside of the pizza box. Was today a park-walking day? She couldn’t remember. Ann Rutherford hadn’t called, so maybe not. 

Then maybe Ann dozed off too, because the next thing she knew, she was glowing. Not literally, but she felt like she was glowing. From somewhere in the distance, she got the impression of marshmallows. 

“Ann,” whispered a voice in her ear.

Also, Leslie was spooning her. Leslie was definitely the big spoon right now.

“I’m awake,” she said, sitting up. Leslie dropped her arms to her sides and hugged herself instead. She looked delighted. 

“I had a dream. I dreamed that I got in trouble with MASTERPLAN. Over you.” 

“Because you told me stuff?” 

Leslie nodded. “But then I remembered something. I remembered that you saved me.” 

“I didn’t really—” 

“You shut your mouth. You did. You saved me from the flu.” 

“So?” 

“Ann,” said Leslie. She appeared to be on the verge of exploding. 

“The bathroom’s down the hall that way—”

“I know. I already found it. I also cleaned up while you were asleep. I hope you don’t mind. Anyway. Ann. You saved me. That means you saved a superhero.” 

Ann had no idea where this was going, or why the repetition of previously established information was so exciting to Leslie. “And?” 

“That makes you a superhero too.” 

A laugh burst out before she could stop it. She wished she’d been able to stop it; Leslie looked particularly hurt. 

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry, Leslie. But just because I took you to the hospital, that doesn’t mean—” 

“And I think you have super special friendship powers too.”

“Is that really a thing?” 

“Yes. Of course it is. Or it should be. It’s hard to find a really good friend.” 

That much, at least, Ann knew to be true. Now Leslie stood and threw back her shoulders. This did not make her appear taller. 

“I can get you registered with MASTERPLAN. I can help you with a uniform and a secret identity and stuff.”

“Leslie—” But Leslie shushed her.

“Ann Perkins,” she said, reaching for Ann’s hands with both of hers, her brow furrowed and hopeful, “will you be my sidekick?” 

_**to be continued…** _


	5. Schaumburg, Illinois, 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Schaumburg, Illinois, 2001

**Schaumburg, Illinois, 2001**

Ann Perkins stepped into the conference center lobby and took a slow glance around. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, exactly, but it wasn’t this. 

“Leslie,” she murmured, “are you sure we’re in the right place?”

“Of course we are.” Leslie was, as ever, confident. “Look over there.” 

She pointed, so Ann looked over there, at one corner of the lobby. There, she saw a badly printed sign for a meeting of the Marvelous And Stupendous Terrific Enthusiastic Readership of Printed Lore and Anthology Novels. 

“I don’t get it,” Ann said, despite recognizing the acronym. 

“This way we look like a stupid comics convention.”

“We’re undercover as Comic-Con?” 

“We’re undercover as a really bad Comic-Con that no one in their right mind would attend. That way it’s not as weird when everyone walks around in costume all day.” 

“Oh.” Ann looked at the sign again, and realized there was a second sign next to it. “What about the ophthalmology conference? Will they be suspicious of us?” 

“No, that’s us too. We always run a secondary dummy conference. I mean, it is actually a real conference, but we’re sponsoring it.” 

“So how do the ophthalmologists…” Ann trailed off, uncertain as to how any of this made sense. 

“It’s under control,” said Leslie, cheerfully. “Don’t worry. It’s always ophthalmology. Ophthalmologists are the profession statistically least likely to be interested in superheroes. I have no idea why that is, but it’s true.” 

“Oh.”

“And we don’t let any of them who _are_ into superheroes come to the conference. Their papers never get accepted, or they have emergencies, or—crap on a contact lens, Ann! You know I can’t be talking about this kind of thing here, in the open.” 

“Sorry.” 

“It’s okay. Let’s check in and get to our room, though. I want to hit the pool before dinner.” 

Ann swallowed as they approached the check-in desk. This was it. This was the weekend she was going to be officially sworn in as a superhero. Leslie, or rather Waffle Woman, was sponsoring her, and then she would sit through a basic training session. Apparently she didn’t have to impress anyone else, or demonstrate that she had any actual powers—this was, she had read in the manual, because too many people were accidentally destructive indoors. But she was still a tiny bit nervous. Mostly, though, this all just felt unreal. The secret superhero identity and accompanying costume that Leslie had helped her pick out did not help Ann’s sense of unreality. 

A blind woman with a guide dog, a handsome German Shepherd mix, walked through the lobby. Ann automatically took a step back to be sure she’d be out of the path. Leslie did not; she was trying very hard not to look at the dog, which sniffed loudly in their direction and wagged its tail. It didn’t exhibit anything Ann would have thought of as abnormal dog behavior, but Leslie stiffened. 

“What? What’s wrong?”

“One of these days,” Leslie sighed, “Freckles is going to blow all our covers.” 

 

**Indianapolis, Indiana, 2002**

Ben Wyatt hunched over his desk, late at night—or not late, exactly, but later than anyone else was working. This was not unusual for him. He worked late fairly often, and he came in early fairly often. It wasn’t that he had no life outside of his job, exactly, it was that he felt his job ought to be a source of comfort. Lately, it hadn’t been, and he needed to recapture the feeling that it was. His job ought to be something he could use to orient himself and navigate through life. It was straightforward, his job: he took piles of numbers that didn’t add up, and he made them add up. Or rather, it should have been straightforward. 

The job was not straightforward. He was good at the work, he knew that; but if he was good at the work, why didn’t he seem to be good at the _job_? 

He’d just come back from French Lick, and despite his repeated professions of admiration for hometown hero Larry Bird, the residents of French Lick had been less than enthused about his presence. Even though he’d fixed almost everything. 

And so he sat at his desk, wrapped in a soft cardigan, surrounded by hard numbers and harder truths.

He was alone. That was a good thing. It was just him and the numbers, and he was going to go through them again, even though he knew they were fine; he was going to go through them until they made sense inside and out, until they told him where, exactly, he had gone wrong in French Lick. 

But he hadn’t gone wrong in French Lick. Not according to the numbers. And that didn’t matter. 

Early that morning, almost as soon as he’d arrived at work, Ben’s boss had called him in. 

“I’ve made a decision,” Rhonda said. 

“About what?” 

Before she could answer, Chris Traeger bounced in. 

“Ben Wyatt!” he said, warmly crushing all of Ben’s metacarpal bones into a pulp. 

“Hi, Chris.” 

Chris had been an auditor since before Ben had been an auditor. They had never spent much time together. Conversations had been had, but these mostly in the vein of office parties or office working lunches, and they had all been superficial. Ben suspected very strongly that there was not much to Chris Traeger beyond the surface. The smooth, well-muscled, highly tailored surface. 

“The two of you are going to be spending a lot of time together.” 

Chris beamed. It was his default expression, and it was irritating. “That’s wonderful!” he said. 

“I’m sorry?” 

“Sit,” ordered Rhonda. They both sat. “I’m sending you two to Greencastle.” 

This did not quite make sense. “You’re sending us both?” Ben asked. “To the same place?” 

Rhonda nodded. “You’ll work as partners,” she said. 

“That,” said Chris Traeger, beaming maddeningly, “is a phenomenal idea.” 

While Ben was always somehow the last person to hear office gossip, the rumors that Chris was pretty terrible at his job had reached even his ears. Often. 

“Great,” Ben said. 

“Two heads are better than one. Especially when both of the heads are so very excellent. Don’t you think so, Ben?” 

Ben said nothing. 

He didn’t say much during lunch, either. This was because Chris Traeger insisted on taking him out, to get to know each other better. 

“It’s what now?” he asked, looking at the mess of green things on his plate.

“Kale salad!” 

“Isn’t kale usually served cooked?” Actually, Ben’s knowledge of kale encompassed one entire fact: a single small leaf of it usually came in grocery store packages of salmon, next to the single wedge of lemon. He had never known why. 

“Oh, it’s even better raw. You are going to love it. Raw kale literally one of my favorite foods. Not my absolute favorite, though. Fresh lettuce is my all-time favorite food.” 

“Uh-huh.” It was all he could get out. The kale was chewy. 

“What’s your all-time favorite food, Ben?” 

He swallowed, sending a disgusting wad of fibrous green down his throat. “I don’t know.” Pizza? That was a thing people said. “Calzones, maybe.” 

The chiseled edge of Chris’s jaw rippled, just slightly, and his eyebrow tweaked in concern. “Calzones? Calzones are very high in fat.” 

“Yeah. That’s why they taste good.” 

Chris shook his head, and after the shake, his features had all settled back into their usual cheerfulness. “You know what’s a delicious form of healthy fat? Avocado!” 

It was not the most pleasant lunch hour Ben had ever experienced. And after lunch, Chris pulled a chair into Ben’s office and yammered on and on about other things: the weather, running marathons, different brands of vitamins, yoga stretches, whether Ben was seeing anyone special (he wasn’t), and the Indianapolis Colts. 

And that was why Ben was still here, past hours. His new partner had prevented him from getting any work done all afternoon. 

The next morning, which was Friday, he mentioned his concerns to Rhonda. She was unimpressed. 

“You’re working together,” she said. He knew better than to argue. 

Ben still wasn’t convinced having a partner was the way to go, until they arrived at Greencastle’s city hall and he watched Chris charm the pants off Greencastle’s mayor, city attorney, and the city council representative from the 3rd Ward. By the time they’d gotten settled in their temporary offices, Chris had all three officials eating out of his hands. 

“I know this is a very trying time for all of you,” said Chris. His beam had been replaced by serious and meaningful cheekbones. “But let me give you my word that my partner Ben and I will have things shipshape in no time. You won’t even notice we’re making budget cuts.” 

“You will notice we will have to make some budget cuts,” Ben interjected. “You are going to notice that.” 

“Well, you’ll notice a tiny bit.” Chris turned his beam back on. “But the whole process will be completely painless.” 

“It won’t be completely painless,” Ben warned. 

Chris chuckled. “Ben,” he told the mayor, “is _very_ serious about his job. He is excellent and thorough and you are going to be just thrilled with the work we’re both going to do.” 

The mayor, city attorney, and city council representative from the 3rd Ward all shuffled down the hallway, looking reassured. 

Ben turned to his new partner and prepared to deliver the first unfortunate but true observation of their nascent partnership. There was just no way he could let Chris continue to lie to these people about how painless the process was going to be. It wasn’t. It was never painless. Some people were going to lose services, and some people were going to lose their jobs; they had to _know_ that.

Unexpectedly, Chris hugged him. Ben stiffened against it, though he couldn’t help noticing that Chris Traeger was ridiculously ripped. 

“You feel slightly malnourished,” said Chris. “Are you getting enough protein, Ben Wyatt?” 

Ben wound up staying late that evening. Not because he wanted to get more work done, but because the alternative was accompanying Chris to the gym. 

He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Rhonda’s number, hoping to reach her, but she’d already left the office. And Chris, who apparently wasn’t at the gym after all, ran by their shared window, caught Ben’s eye, and waved wildly. 

This quickly became a pattern. They would arrive together, first thing in the morning, and Ben would hem and haw and clear his throat while Chris made extravagant promises about not cutting services that they could not possibly keep. They’d work together through the morning, grab lunch, and then, after a suitable period of digestion time had passed, Chris would put on skin-tight workout clothes and disappear for hours. He’d return around 4:30, fresh as a daisy somehow, and sit down to his spreadsheets as though it was entirely normal to go running for three hours in the middle of the workday and return without having broken a sweat. 

“What are your plans for the weekend, Ben Wyatt?” 

“Um. Nothing.” 

“Are you driving back to Indy for the weekend?” 

Ben shrugged. He had neither a strong reason to stay nor a strong reason to go. 

“Well, I hope you’ll stay here. I have arranged the most wonderful Saturday evening plans.”

“Plans?” 

Chris nodded. “There’s someone I think you should meet. Her name is Cindy Reynolds, and she works in the county assayer’s office.” 

At this, Ben bristled. “You know we can’t date government employees, right? It’s unethical.” 

“That is very true,” Chris said. “And it is a very important rule. But it only applies to _city_ government employees. Cindy Reynolds works for the county. You don’t have any influence over the county government budgets. Therefore, the two of you can date.” 

And, though it felt like his entire body was sighing silently in protest, Ben agreed to go on the blind date. 

Cindy Reynolds turned out to be nice enough, but not his type. Her only personality trait, so far as he could tell, was “nice.” She claimed to genuinely like Olive Garden, she did not understand sarcasm, and she was a little too impressed that he’d worked in French Lick, hometown of basketball legend Larry Bird. 

“You know I didn’t actually meet Larry Bird, right?” 

Cindy’s face fell in disappointment, but she picked it back up again fairly fast. 

“Did...did Chris tell you I had met Larry Bird?” 

“Not exactly,” she said, “but he insinuated you had worked together.” 

Chris tried to set him up again the next weekend, equally unsuccessfully, and then he tried to set Ben up for Thursday night. On Thursday, Ben put his foot down. Unfortunately, the best excuse he could think of for rejecting the lovely (or so Chris said, anyway) Rebecca Schickel sight unseen was that he wanted to get through some more numbers. 

So he stayed late at City Hall. He called Rhonda and left another message that the partnership wasn’t a productive one. And he got back to work. 

He was still working when the visitor came. 

A subtle throat-clearing noise came from just outside the door. Reflexively, Ben lifted his head. 

If he’d been thinking about the kinds of noises one heard in buildings late at night, he would have assumed he was going to see a member of the custodial staff. Instead, though, he was thinking about Chris Traeger, and how he wasn’t sure he could stand to work with the man another week. 

And so he was perhaps less surprised than he ought to have been when he realized that the figure standing in his doorway was not a janitor, but someone wearing blue nurse’s scrubs and a giant rubber fish-shaped mask that encompassed its entire head. It carried a rather ordinary tote bag over one shoulder.

He got out a quick “Good lord!” before he froze in shock. 

“Ben?” asked the figure. It spoke in a woman’s voice that was somehow both soothing and uncertain. 

He blinked twice, on purpose. The fish....nurse...thing... remained there. 

“Can I help you?” He couldn’t, he was sure of that; his heart was racing too quickly. 

“You’re Ben Wyatt, right?” 

“Yes.” Ben stood up, but did not move closer. “Uh…” 

“Hi. Can I come in?” He made an infinitesimal motion with one eyebrow. She stepped into the office, glanced up and down the hallway, and shut the door. She was careful not to let the latch make a sound. He noticed that. 

She sat. Ben sat. Ben stared at her. The overhead lights cast shadows into the rubber eyes of the fish head; he couldn’t see any part of her real face at all. Her hands and forearms—these he could see—were a pleasant bronze that told him absolutely nothing about her, other than that she probably wasn’t ethnically Irish and she probably wasn’t married. 

“I’m the Beautiful Nurse.” 

He started getting a funny feeling. It wasn’t quite deja vu, but it was close. 

“Hi,” he said. “Uh...Beautiful Nurse?” 

She nodded, wrinkling the fish mask into a bizarre distortion. “That’s my name.” 

He waited. 

“I’m a superhero,” she said. 

“Oh.” 

“You probably haven’t heard of me. I’m not really—I mean, I’m more of a sidekick?” 

“That’s—that’s a question?” 

The Beautiful Nurse shook her head. “I don’t know.” 

“Okay Um. What do you—what’s your superpower?” Ben took a deep breath, which stuck somewhere in his pharynx. “Do I have cancer or something?” 

“Cancer?” She sat bolt upright. “No. Not that I know of. How would I know that?” 

“I don’t know. You’re—you have nurse superpowers?” 

“Right,” she said. “I mean, no. Wrong. I don’t have nurse superpowers. I…” 

Though he couldn’t see beyond the rubber fish head, Ben was almost certain that this woman was trying to compose her face into a calm, measured expression. Or she was rolling her eyes. He was almost certain that she was doing one of those two things. 

“Look, this isn’t about me. This is about you. I have a message.” 

“A message,” he repeated. “From whom?” 

“That’s not important. Hang on, I have it written down.” 

The Beautiful Nurse rummaged around in her tote bag and pulled out a binder, the kind that had plastic sheet protectors so you could add your own covers. _Top Secret Mission Plans! Absolutely Forbidden For Anyone Other Than The Beautiful Nurse To Read!_ was printed in multicolored printer ink on the front cover. _T.S.M.P! A.F.F.A.O.T.T.B.N.T.R._ was written on the spine. 

She cleared her throat again. “I, the Beautiful Nurse, am here to inform you, Benjamin Wyatt, that no one accomplishes anything alone.” 

“Okay.”

“So you need to tough it out with Chris. It will improve both of you in the long run. This is an important life lesson, one that I, the Beautiful Nurse, probably already knew because my own partner is incredible, but—” 

The Beautiful Nurse stopped reading then. She flipped through a few pages. But Ben’s blood had frozen at the fourth-to-last word. 

“Who’s your partner?” 

“Oh, my god. This speech is eighteen pages long. Single-spaced.” 

“Who’s your partner?” he asked again.

The Beautiful Nurse sighed and closed the binder. She looked at him instead, making direct eye contact. At least, he thought she was making direct eye contact. He still couldn’t see her eyes. 

“Okay. So the point of this is, no one accomplishes anything alone. You’ve been having a hard time at work because you’re trying to do it alone. And you’re having a hard time with Chris Traeger because you’re not accepting him as your partner.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

The Beautiful Nurse stood up. She shrugged. 

“It means what it says,” she said. “Those were my instructions. To tell you that you’re having a hard time because you’re trying to do too much by yourself. You need to trust Chris. Work with him, not against him. There are about thirty more aphorisms, but I think you get the point.” And she walked out the door. 

Ben remained seated, feeling a little stunned. 

“Wait!” he called. He jumped to his feet, rushed into the hallway, and was surprised to see that the Beautiful Nurse had not, in fact, vanished into thin air. She was merely halfway down the hall. He broke into a half-jog, trying to catch up. 

She hesitated, but kept walking. “You’re not supposed to ask questions. I mean, I was told that you probably would. I have strict orders not to answer any of them.” 

“I just need to know.” He was pretty sure he already knew. “Are you—is your partner—?” 

“I can’t tell you anything, Ben.” 

“Why not?” 

“I just can’t. My lips are sealed.” 

“But—” 

She stopped, then, and laid a firm hand on his forearm. “This is my first solo mission,” she said. “I know it probably doesn’t seem like much of a mission to you, but it’s kind of a big deal for me. So I’m not going to screw it up. And my instructions were to tell you only that no one accomplishes anything alone.” 

“Can you at least tell me what your powers are?” 

The Beautiful Nurse shook her fish head as she walked away from him and Ben, not knowing what else to do, let her go. 

Back in his office, he stared again at his paperwork, trying to make some sense out of what had just happened. But that was something he couldn’t possibly do, so he packed everything up and went back to the motel, where he waited impatiently for his laptop to connect with the dial-up internet. Then he jumped on the superhero message boards. 

No one was posting about the Beautiful Nurse. No one was posting about Waffle Woman, either. The last post about Waffle Woman was from over a year ago, and it was one he’d made himself. But this had to have something to do with her. It had to. Didn’t it? There was no possible way that he, ordinary state budget auditor with a surprisingly troubled past he kept concealed Ben Wyatt, would have come to the attention of a _second_ superhero. But there was also no possible way that Waffle Woman was still keeping an eye on him. Was there? 

And the last time he’d seen Waffle Woman, she had told him that he didn’t need her help. So what was this about accepting a partner? Had he gotten worse in the past couple of years?

He stayed up way too late combing through dusty old corners of the internet, looking for traces of her, and when he finally went to bed, he couldn’t sleep. When he finally fell asleep, it was fitful. He tossed and turned and woke up in a tangled, nervous embrace with one of the spare pillows, a faint memory of burnt marshmallow receding back into his subconscious. 

No one accomplishes anything alone. _No one accomplishes anything alone._ He turned the phrase over and over in his mind as he drifted into an uneasy sleep. 

In the morning, he threw a pair of running shoes into his work bag and, filled with trepidation, prepared to acquiesce to Chris Traeger’s ridiculous way of doing things. Or at least...acquiesce halfway. Filled with trepidation, he prepared to meet Chris Traeger halfway. 

Two weeks later, although his diet had been vastly improved, Ben’s resolve was crumbling. He found himself burying his head in his hands as Chris escorted various members of the Board of Education from their workroom. Everyone was relaxed and cheerful, except him. 

“Chris,” he said, when he’d shut the door behind the school superintendent, “you have got to be more realistic about the numbers.” 

“It’s better to be kind than to be cruel, Ben. Kindness is literally the most endearing trait of the human condition.” 

That didn’t even make sense. Ben pressed his forefingers to his temples. 

“It’s not cruel to be honest. It’s cruel to give them false expectations.” 

A pensive look crossed Chris’s brow. “But they respond so much better to cheerful news. Even if the cheerful news is later replaced by other, less cheerful news.” 

“Look, Captain Positivity, we can’t just—”

Chris turned ever so slightly pale. Then he turned shockingly businesslike. It was almost as though a mask had fallen over his impossibly sculpted features. 

“Back to work,” he said. “I will continue looking over the accounts of the city planning office. How are you doing with the parks and recreation department?” He opened a folder and stared intensely at it, not even looking in Ben’s direction. 

Ben watched him carefully for a moment, then excused himself. He found the men’s restroom. Thankfully, it was empty. 

He splashed a little water on his face, then stared intently, making eye contact with his own reflection. 

He had meant the words sarcastically. But…

But. 

“My partner is _actually_ Captain Positivity,” he told himself. It sounded ridiculous, but it had to be true. This explained so much. Or, rather, it explained two things: one, why Chris was so impossibly handsome and athletic, and two, why Chris was terrible at his job. 

It was the perfect cover for Captain Positivity, wasn’t it? Ben knew only too well how relentlessly negative auditing could be. You had to make cuts to important services. You had to fire people who hadn’t done anything wrong. The only more potentially soul-crushing profession Ben could think of, off the top of his head, was pediatric oncology. 

Ben said very little for the rest of the morning, and by lunchtime, Chris seemed more relaxed. By the end of the afternoon, he was back to his usual ebullience, even though—Ben took special note of this—Chris had not gone on his usual afternoon jog. 

“Great job, buddy,” he said, with a quick glance over Ben’s notes. “Really excellent. Two people can accomplish so much when they work together.” 

Ben nodded. 

“Absolutely.” 

The next day, Chris did go on his usual afternoon 10k, returning hours later with what looked like puffy paint under his fingernails. The day after that, when Chris prepared to depart, Ben snuck into his own car, exchanged his oxfords for running shoes, and followed him. 

For a while, Chris jogged smartly along various roads and sidewalks and trails, taking a circuitous route that eventually put him on the DePauw campus. Ben parked at a nearby meter and jogged after him, glad he’d put his running shoes on. 

Chris had almost gotten out of sight while Ben responsibly dropped quarters in the meter, but he was still visible. He was headed towards the campus library, it looked like.

“Really?” Ben muttered, shaking his head. There was a phone booth, an honest-to-God phone booth, outside the library, and Chris had ducked into it. But surely not. Surely he wouldn’t—

Ben crept as close as he dared, which was about fifty yards. 

A moment later, the phone booth burst open, and out strode Captain Positivity, resplendent in head-to-toe Lycra. He wore a Batman-style cowl, but with two thumbs up in place of the bat ears. Even from fifty yards away, Ben could see the gleam on his brilliant white teeth. 

Captain Positivity paused for a moment, hands on hips, then turned and jogged off so that Ben could read the words _WAY TO GO, BUDDY_ , which were emblazoned on his cape. 

It was proof enough, and he ought to go back to work now, but—damn it. He was here, and he’d never actually seen a superhero in action before, Waffle Woman notwithstanding. And he’d really only seen _her_ sitting at tables. So he trailed Captain Positivity as best he could, feeling faintly ridiculous about the whole thing. He was a grown man on a college campus, jogging in his work clothes (he hadn’t even taken his necktie off, merely loosened it) after a caped crusader. And what was he going to do? Observe? Confront Captain Positivity then? Confront Chris later? Confronting sounded awfully satisfying at the moment. 

Into a student union-esque building went Captain Positivity, and down some stairs to a basement. Then he disappeared into a room. 

Ben gave him a full count of sixty, then headed down the basement hall himself. 

Inside the room, Captain Positivity was distributing hugs. A quick glance at a flyer by the door informed him that they were a support group for students who had loved ones in active military combat zones. 

Outside the room, Ben chastised himself. In fact, he felt vaguely ill at his own actions. He shook his head as he climbed the basement stairs. 

As he left the student union, he noticed a clothesline of Take Back the Night t-shirts, fluttering in the breeze, their puffy paint slogans shining fierce and true. It didn’t take a skilled detective to notice that a lot of the puffy paint was the same color that had turned up under Chris’s fingernails yesterday.

Confront Captain Positivity, indeed. No. He never would. 

But there was one thing he would do. Under the assumption that Waffle Woman _might_ , in fact, be stalking him, Ben started ordering waffles every time he went to a diner. 

Nothing ever came of it. That might have been, he told himself, because Waffle Woman really didn’t have anything to do with waffles. 

 

**Pawnee, Indiana, several weeks later**

Ann Perkins pulled into the driveway of her new home and was unsurprised to see that there was already a car parked there. 

“Leslie?” she called as she let herself in. 

“Ann! I’m so glad you’re back. How did everything go? Are you exhausted? Here, let me hug you.” 

“It was fine,” Ann said. She was exhausted, though, and accepted Leslie’s hug gratefully, even though she knew it would transfer nothing but friendship right now. “You know it was fine. We talked on the phone every day.” 

They sat on her couch. Leslie tucked her feet underneath her. She had set out a tray of chocolate chip cookies and a bottle of red wine on the coffee table. 

“I know, but it’s a big deal. It was your first solo mission, and then you had to go back to Ann Arbor and I couldn’t go there either—” 

“You could have come to Ann Arbor with me.”

Leslie shook her head. “It’s better I didn’t go. If it had been any wedding other than Ann Rutherford’s, maybe, but she’s _seen_ me.” 

“Not as Waffle Woman,” Ann pointed out. She helped herself to a glass of wine. “But it was fine. Everything went fine.” 

She refrained from reminding Leslie, again, that Leslie knew this because Leslie had been there. Leslie had only gone back to Pawnee after a full secret debriefing in a dark alley several blocks from the state budget auditor’s offices. This had been unfortunate. She could really have used Leslie’s help doing the other thing she’d gone back to Ann Arbor to do, which was packing up the final remains of her Michigan life and putting them on a moving truck to Pawnee. 

Leslie peered close into Ann’s eyes, then shoved a cookie into her mouth. “There’s something you’re not telling me.” 

“About Ben? I told you everything I could remember about Ben.” He had brown hair. He was kind of thin. He was wearing boring pants. 

“Are you sure not reading the entire letter was the right call?” 

“Yes,” Ann said firmly. “If I had read the entire letter, he definitely would have known you were behind this. I am 99.9 percent sure he knew anyway.” 

Leslie gave a dramatic sigh, and flopped backwards. 

“Why isn’t he supposed to know, again?” 

“Because I’ve already _helped_ him. Not once, but twice. It’s too close to Lois Lane-ing, Ann. You can’t let a civilian become dependent on you, or attached to you.” 

The Lois Lane rule was something Ann felt she grasped, intuitively, but she remained unconvinced that Leslie’s application of it made sense. 

“So you sent in another superhero, not just to help him the one time—with something I don’t even think he needed help doing—” 

“No, he didn’t. He’s ruthlessly competent.” 

“—so you arranged for Captain Positivity to be his partner, _permanently_?” 

“It’s a brilliant plan, Ann. Captain Positivity isn’t working as Captain Positivity. He’s working as his secret identity. That’s why the Lois Lane rule doesn’t apply.” 

“And what’s Ben getting out of this?” 

“It’s a win-win,” said Leslie, mostly still with patience. “What Ben needs is moral support and a little tact. What Captain Positivity needs is someone to make him face the hard stuff.” 

“Do you even know whether Captain Positivity is like that in his real life?” 

“Captain Positivity _is_ his real life.” 

“Right,” Ann agreed, although, as usual, the rules of being a superhero were starting to give her a headache. “But being a state budget auditor is also his real life. Right?” 

“Right. They’re both his real life. And yes, he’s like that in both lives.” 

“Okay.” 

“It’s like this, Ann.” Leslie sat up extra straight, so that Ann knew she was about to say something very serious. “Since you became my best friend, and my sidekick, and you moved here, everything has been about ten thousand times better. I mean, there’s still a ton of red tape at City Hall that I can’t machete my way through. And I still think my boss might hate me, and I still haven’t gotten a speaking engagement at the MASTERPLAN annual conference, and yes, my fling with the Robert E. Leeinator may have been ill-advised—”

“I should never have let you go on that date.” 

“No, you shouldn’t have.” 

“Although I didn’t find out about the date until afterwards.” 

“And by that time I’d already realized he was married. And that he never took the Robert E. Leeinator costume off.” She brushed off something invisible. “The point is, Ann, this has been a really great year, and that’s because I’ve had you. My partner in crime. Except we don’t actually break any laws.” 

“Uh-huh,” said Ann, who was pretty sure they had at least engaged in some breaking and entering that some people, such as the police, might not have considered entirely legal. 

“So I’m just trying to help other people have the same kind of experience.” 

Based on her brief encounters in Indianapolis, Ann did not think the men were going to have the same kind of experience she and Leslie were having. 

“And,” said Leslie, plowing ruthlessly onwards, “it really is part of my mission. I mean, look at what they do for a living, Ann. They balance budgets.” She bit into a second cookie. “If that’s not efficient municipal government, what is?” 

Ann took in her best friend and partner, barefoot on her couch in a cookie crumb-covered pantsuit, and smiled. 

“Now. Ann, you have to tell me the thing you’re not telling me.”

“How can you even tell there’s something I’m not telling you?” 

“I just can, okay? Tell me. Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me—” 

“Okay, fine.” Ann let out a huge breath. “So, let me just start by saying that you _know_ I was wearing that ridiculous fish mask when I went into Captain Positivity’s hotel room. You do know that. You know there’s no way he saw my face.” 

“Oh, no,” said Leslie. “Ann, did you sleep with him?” 

“No!” She took a swallow of wine. “He did ask me out, though.”

“As superheroes?”

“I don’t know. He knew I was one, of course, but I don’t think he knew that _I_ knew that he was.” She had approached Captain Positivity as though he was a mere civilian, the Indiana state budget auditor he was in public. She wondered how many people had traced the appearances of Captain Positivity—he had a marked propensity for visiting pediatric oncology wards, Wounded Warrior events, and the Special Olympics—and connected them, as Leslie had, to the auditing activities of one Christopher Traeger. Probably none, since no one who didn’t have “efficient municipal government” as a superpower would even bother looking at auditors. 

Leslie nodded. “That’s why you had to be the one to talk to him,” she said. “He’s never seen me with my mask off, but he’s really good with people. He might have recognized my voice.” 

“I said no.” 

“Oh, Ann.” Leslie reached over and patted Ann’s arm. “Good for you. That was a good choice. Look how careless he is! If he didn’t know you knew he was a superhero, he just asked you to break the rules. And if he did know that you knew that he was a superhero, he’s being very careless with his own secret identity.” 

A tiny splash of red wine reached Ann’s brain, setting off some slight fuzzies. 

“Leslie,” she groaned, “have you seen him without his mask on?” 

Leslie shook her head. 

“He’s _really_ attractive. From the neck up, too, I mean. Not just from the neck down.” 

“Mmm,” said Leslie. “From the neck down? Yeah, okay. I can see it.” 

“You can see it?”

She nodded. “But he’s not my type.” 

“Then what the hell is your type?” 

“I don’t know if I really have a _type_ ,” said Leslie, thoughtfully. “But, you know, dark and mysterious. And he should have a really great butt. And play the organ.” 

“I think you just described the Phantom of the Opera.” 

“Or Senator Biden from Delaware.”

“Who?” Ann had not yet confessed to Leslie that she couldn’t name the senators from either her old state of Michigan or her newly adopted state of Indiana, but this particular admission seemed safe. 

“He’s chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” 

“Mmkay.” 

Leslie turned very slightly pink. “Well, you asked.” 

“I wasn’t trying to make fun. I just don’t know what he looks like. Does he play the organ?” 

“I don’t know. But he’s got a really great butt.” 

Ann smiled. “I bet he does.” 

“Anyway,” Leslie said, returning to her usual businesslike demeanor. “Our next mission. It’s a bit close to home for my taste, but there’s an animal shelter in Patterson that could really use some extra funds. I was thinking it might be fun to coordinate a bake sale. We can get the middle school to do it, and that way we can easily make it looked like we weren’t involved at all. Then, there’s an all-girls summer camp I’ve been dying to get off the ground. And I’ll really need your help with that one because I’m spearheading it through my day job.”

“Really?” 

Ann knew perfectly well that what Leslie did at her day job wasn’t too far off from what she did as Waffle Woman, but Leslie was very careful not to let the two overlap. She couldn’t let the two overlap, in fact. The awkwardly Let’s Stop Destroying New York City Under the Guise of Saving It Rule, usually referred to in shorthand as the Gotham Prohibition, prohibited superheroes from superheroing in their hometowns, but Ann suspected that if the circumstances were dire enough (not actually dire, but what Leslie perceived as dire), then Leslie would ultimately decide that the Gotham Prohibition could be broken. 

That was, if Leslie’s powers worked in her hometown. For some reason, they didn’t. Within Pawnee’s borders, Leslie was powerless. It might have been a good thing, Ann thought. Leslie’s hugs were still great, but since she had relocated to Pawnee, there had been a lot more of them, and it was kind of a relief that they didn’t keep her up all night. 

“I’m going to situate the camp on the other side of Eagleton,” Leslie said, making a face at the word _Eagleton_. “It’ll still be in Wamapoke County. But outside the city limits, so I can still make some stuff happen if I need to. I think.” 

Ann nodded and took a deep breath. 

“What do you need me to do?” 

**(to be continued…)**


End file.
